Happy New Year everyone :)
I don't want to whine about Maya here (although there is plenty to whine about) but have run into a serious snag, and think many of you clever heads have touched on this and might be in the know. Unfortunately my worklife, like many others, now center around using Maya as main production tool. We are scattering rocks in a desert, and are running into serious performance issues. We are using rsProxies which are being instanced and we have tried MASH as well as nParticles. We can generate a lot of particles, but we quickly run out of RAM when rendering, which might indicate that the rsProxies are all being loaded into RAM. Our limit so far is around 1 million rocks on a system with 128 MB RAM and two 1080 ti. Above that I can see RAM usage going above 90 GB and the machine crashes. The rocks have a lot of polygons - around 2.500 polys each, so we should be around 875 million polygons, which renders fairly quickly. I know we could reduce the geometry of the rocks and get to render more, but I would have expected that using rsProxies we ought to be able to render a lot(!) more instances. I did some testing: - I can render around 5+ million particle primitive spheres in the same setup before running out of RAM. 128 GB on my machine. - I can render 1 million instanced geometry rocks. Scene processing takes a long time but rendering is quick. 1.5 million and the system cannot allocate enough VRAM (dual 1080ti) - The same goes for instanced rsProxy rocks, ie. there seems to be no advantage of using proxies in this case, which is weird. I would love to hear how I can render many more proxies in Maya I use a simple scene for testing purposes, with only the generator mesh (ground) and the few rocks to be instanced, and then of course the nParticle system, nothing fancy. I tried building a scene from scratch in Maya 2019 and the results are the same. If I try 2 million rock instances Maya crashes hard. I have removed the linked mesh, using bounding boxes instead, and activated VP2 GPU Instancing (which likely only benefits UI performance) and tried with geo rocks for scattering in the scene as well as rsProxies - same result. Something fills up memory when the instances are created and/or translated to Redshift. I can generate and render 40 million rocks (same geo, shaders and textures) in XSI/ ICE in about 5 minutes and 30 seconds, so the machine is quite capable, and I would expect more if not same performance in Maya... This is around 189 billion triangles and only uses around 20 GB system RAM. It is clear something is not right in the Maya scene, and from my testing I suspect the Maya instancer not doing what it is supposed to do… Is this a known bottleneck, or is there perhaps a way to do this I have not found yet? Any pointers will be much appreciated, as I have run out of ideas. Maya 2018.6 - Redshift V2.6.40 Cheers Morten - AKA Pitcher ------ Softimage Mailing List. To unsubscribe, send a mail to [email protected] with "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm.
