Votes
1
Product:
iClone 7
Version:
7.61
Status:
Active
Issue 6424
Critical - add the option to change smoothing/displacement levels in the stand alone render -animations can take days to export with smoothing
Users: While you may not have votes left, you can still reply to this with agree or disagree etc.

A major Tip for Reallusion that will relieve a lot of frustration for users working with IRAY for Animation (this is absolutely critical) is that if you can add an option in the stand alone render to have subdivision levels increased/decrease for any object/character.

We have insanely slow exports to use with the stand alone Renderer.. it could take up to a couple days just to export a 500 frame project that has displacement where as when using Indigo Renderer displacement could be enabled and adjusted in the Indigo program once exported and we would only have to wait for the Rendering only.

So while we initially think it's very easy to work with IRAY, it's a false positive because it's another major level of project delay just waiting for the Renders and a seat to be free. IRAY makes Indigo Render look fast in comparison when using displacement!

So please Reallusion fix this asap!!

I will also add that when exporting heavy projects with mesh smoothing any displacement over 1x will cause iClone to crash.
My work around with Indigo is to enable smoothing but set displacement to 0 and then once exported increase the level of displacement -otherwise if you export with displacement levels high from iClone exporting will feel like it's taking forever or as if iCone froze.

I have 32 GB of host ram, 1 RTX 2080 Ti with 2 GTX 970s, i7 4GHz and SSDs, I can only imagine the frustration others are going through that often will have more than half that.
OS: Windows 10
Related Issue:   Iray fails when working with subdivision & displacement on the same model - Iray crashes in iClone and Iray standalone the GPUs don't work (Issue 6592)
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SuggestionIray Render
Submitted byAscensi
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COMMENTS (11)
Ascensi 
Hi Joanne, thanks for getting back to me on this and the tip about Indigo Renderer which I do have with the plugin but a lot of projects already setup with Iray.   I'm glad that Reallusion will be talking about potentially developing it further..  compatibility with iClones SSS with opacity support would be huge!  I have mention this in another thread as well as resuming renders from the actual place from a crash or manual stop. I will mention the other issues in a different Feedback thread.

So while I did have have major issues with Subdivision settings,  it was because the tessellation was too high and maybe it would be good for iClone to alert the user when smooth mesh by subdivision is on and the user tries to push tessellation level past 3 and maybe if both subdivision and tessellation are active at the same time then subdivision level can't go past L1. For the most part I found that having Smooth Subdivision on with tessellation between 1 and 2 seems decent enough that Iray or iClone doesn't freeze or crash.
Joanne (RL) 
Hi Ascensi,

Thank you for your test and report.

I am sorry that Iray can not have the settings for smooth level currently, because Nvidia Iray SDK does not provide this function.
The current process is that IC/CC sends the mesh data to Iray engine to render, and iClone/CC does not have the intervention for the mesh data in this data transfer process. 
PS. Indigo engine has the ability to adjust the smooth mesh itself, so IC can exchange the information during this data transfer process.

The new version Nvidia Iray SDK has the efficiency of speeding up render, team will discuss it in future versions. 

In addition, you mentioned a few questions, could you please help report the issues in another Feedback? 
In this way, it is easier for us to track the processing status. Thank you!

Joanne
Ascensi 
Update:  I baked the displacement into a new model which came to 48 MB (856744 project triangles) using 3.1 GB vram  and imported it into iClone and loaded Iray.. it crashed but perhaps it was because I wanted to see if additional displacement using the same displacement texture would all me to push the quality a bit further (It didn't, I'd have to use smooth mesh by displacement again to prevent tearing.  I opened up the project again, deleted the displacement textures, set iClone to min mode and made sure nothing else was enabled )unchecked smooth mesh, displacement, all reflection settings. I used the same 8K textures

 It was blazingly fast!  no crashes.  Still need to get subdivision working with tessellation with Iray.
Ascensi 
@
Feedback Tracker Admin  what has been fix? exporting is still extremely slow when a model has smooth mesh by subdivision with tessellation/displacement texture. Outside iClone ALL GPU  devices fail in Iray Stand alone Render and defaults to CPU render!!   It fails rendering Iray in iClone almost every time! Also the update notes for the latest version (7.7) did not state any specific fixes for anything mentioned above. 
https://www.reallusion.com/iclone/patchinfo.html
Ascensi 
Using project with no mesh smoothing (default turntable animation)  I started Iray Stand alone for 600 frames.. output @ 1280 x 720 was pumping them out pretty fast, or as one would expect (23 seconds for a frame)  using one RTX 2080 Ti with two GTX 970s.  As soon as I pressed pause then released it couldn't recover the speed and the GPU devices failed. I ended the operation, restarted Iray and it asked me if I wanted to resume from the crash, I accepted it and render speed was again on target.

Conclusion, I would also check the pause feature, perhaps if the pause doesn't work that you use an end program and recover from crash script as the pause button because otherwise it makes no sense and just slows down the render once the pause it used.
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