[stephensamuels]

@stephensamuels

Ok, so i built the machine and it fired up on the first click so all is good (had a minor panic at the outset when the CPU went straight to 93 degrees C but the cooler wasn’t seated properly – now it’s fine at around 40 degrees).  The twenty second animation now takes 24 hours to render instead of 14 days, which is terrific.

But i do have a question about it.

When i look at the system monitors, the CPU rarely gets above 10% utilisation, and the graphics cards, one rarely peaks at 50% and the second card is hardly used at all.  I’ve got NVIDIA SLI configured and optimised for 3D, and i’ve got Blender seeing both cards and using GPU processing.

So my question is, why isn’t Blender driving the hardware harder?  To me it looks as though the machine could easily render the sequence in under 12 hours if it used more of the system.  Have i got a bottleneck somewhere or is there a limitation to how fast Blender can work?

Incidentally, i put together another sequence of around 1200 objects falling under gravity with no materials and Simplify checked – and it takes forever to process the animation!  It won’t even update the viewport for each frame, it just jumps eight or ten frames at a time and the screen whites out in between so interrupting the animation is almost impossible.

I can’t help feeling there’s something not right here and any suggestions would be really appreciated.  Thanks.

[stephensamuels]

Thanks all for your thoughts and experiences, hopefully this thread will remain open so we can continue to compare, especially with the advent of 2.8.  Incidentally, has anyone at Blender mentioned any change in processing requirements for 2.8?  I’m still working on the recommended high end spec  given on their website.

Anyway, having googled my life to a standstill, i’m going for a self-build workstation with the following core spec:

i7900 10 core processor

32GB DDR4 RAM

2 x Quadro P4000 4GB video cards

Plus a hunk of storage etc.

All in all, around £5k sterling for the bits which includes two colour correct monitors.

Hopefully it will future proof me for a while – and shorten my waiting times!!  I’ll still have the laptop for design, then  throw them onto the workstation for processing.

Incidentally, a quick update on the poor old laptop – i created a 20 sec animation in 4K with 510 moving objects – it took 14 days to render!!  You could almost hear the electrons creaking through it!  I’ll not be doing that again.

[stephensamuels]

Hi Stefan, that’s very interesting as i was just looking at a threadripper and 1080ti set up as a step up from my current machine.  Would be good to hear how you find it – breathtakingly fast? – and what’s causing the render crashes.

Thanks for the ‘discipline’ tips, they are much appreciated.  Will work harder to keep my scenes clean!

PS  Where can i find out about Render Layers?  I don’t know what they are or how to use them.

[stephensamuels]

Hi Ronald

I’m away from my machine but essentially it was 1600 square tiles in a square array that had a different photographic image UV projected on each side.  A burning sphere moved in a spiral path above the array and, using animation nodes, they flipped over in its path.  One camera followed a simple tracking path and there was one light source, no background at that stage.  So, not a huge number of polygons (6 per tile and a UV sphere), recorded at 24fps and the resolution was 4k.  I can’t remember the other render settings but they wouldn’t have been radical – i’m not at that stage yet!

As for the performance tips, they’re terrific.  Will work my way through and see how it helps.

Very much appreciated, thanks.

[stephensamuels]

Thanks Ben, I’ll give it a try and see what it tells me.

[stephensamuels]

Hi Ihumungus, my output isn’t sufficient for a render farm yet but one day, when i’m famous!  In the meantime, i guess my real need for speed is in making adjustments en route to the final edit.  Rerunning simulations etc take time and after every small change, it gets a bit tiring.  It just seems to me when watching tutorials that other people’s machines are much  more responsive and update the changes so much quicker.

Thanks for your help.

[stephensamuels]

Hi  Silentheart00, i have used GPU although i often get CUDA errors and have to switch back to CPU.  I’m sure it’s a driver problem but every time i go on the NVIDIA site for an update, it just hangs.  Not sure what it’s all about!

Incidentally, i thought GPU was mainly for materials and textures and doesn’t aid animation that much?  Is that right?  Maybe skewed logic.

Thanks for your help.

[stephensamuels]

I can only dream of understanding that question let alone answering it!

[stephensamuels]

SorryThibaut, i’m nowhere near experienced enough to add value to that question! I don’t even recognise most of the manufacturers although they frequently use the same chipsets so, aside from build quality, i’m not sure there’s a whole lot in it.  But what do i know . . . . . .?

[stephensamuels]

Thanks for your thoughts Pieriko, they’re helpful.  With sooo much choice of components out there, it’s really hard to get a definitive view on performance versus value when using something like Blender.

When you say ‘beware of GPU memory’ what did you mean?  The installed memory on the graphics card?  And what’s to beware of?

Any further thoughts would be much appreciated.

[stephensamuels]

Think i’ve sorted it, although clearly baking is still a bit of a mystery to me.  It makes no appreciable difference to the viewport, it still takes forever to run through an animation whether i’ve baked it or not so not sure i see the point.

Anyway, thanks for your help KENT!!

[stephensamuels]

Sorry!!!  Kent!!!!

[stephensamuels]

Hi Trent.  I’ve got an object that’s dynamically painting onto a plane as it travels across.  It takes a while because the plane has many subdivisions, even though it’s only 110 frames at 24fps.  I understand why that’s the case – my laptop has to work hard at these animations.

I’m happy with the animation and would like to ‘fix’ the dynamic paint by baking in order to use the vertex weights to control materials on the plane.

My only problem is that when the timeline reaches frame 110, it flips back to frame 1 and starts the animation again so – I assume – the cache empties and I have to wait for the whole damn thing to process the animation again.  I think this is definitely the case becuase when I stop the animation, a message comes up on the cache panel saying there’s only one or two frames in the cache.

If the bake is actually saving the animation somewhere – where is it, and how do i load it back again into the animation?

Hope that makes it clearer and thank you for your help.

Stephen

[stephensamuels]

Great responses everyone, all your efforts are much appreciated.  I think I’ve got it but we’ll find out when I try it!!

[stephensamuels]

Hi, I asked the same question about this one too – passed but not confirmed in the learning flow.  Thanks.

https://cgcookie.com/exercise_submissions/8220

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