CPU / Memory issue

PjotterPjotter Posts: 274
edited December 1969 in Carrara Discussion

With rendering my CPU is the bottleneck. I know that. But how about running an animation in Assembly or moving around in a big scene. It can get really slow. My CPU is running at 15% average (8 cores) during the animation and my RAM has 2 free GB. So what causes the slowing down process? (I have enabled multiprocessors)

Comments

  • evilproducerevilproducer Posts: 9,050
    edited December 1969

    The issue in the Assembly room is partly your graphics card. You can optimize your Assembly room view without affecting your Render room settings by using the Interactive Renderer. It's the little icon that looks like an up arrow surrounded by a circle at the top right of your Assembly room window.


    Click the icon and a new window will open with a bunch of options. The one that may help the most is to adjust the texture map size downwards, It defaults to the highest size. There are also other options to change that can help,performance, such as turning off the transparency, etc. At the bottom of the window, there is a place to set the fps and some other options as well.


    Note: the Interactive Renderer is scene specific. The settings you choose will only be for that scene in which you changed them. The other thing I want to stress again is that it will not in any way effect the final render!


    The other thing that can slow the Assembly room to a crawl is the complexity of the scene. Namely the geometry in the scene. The more polys, the slower it goes. There are also some things you can do. If you have a terrain, lower the preview size. I usually set the preview size the same as the render size when placing things on the terrain, and then when I'm done I lower the preview size.


    Hope some of this helps!

  • evilproducerevilproducer Posts: 9,050
    edited August 2013

    Heh! Forgot to post some screen shots! :red:

    Picture_5.png
    444 x 105 - 17K
    Picture_4.png
    450 x 111 - 13K
    Picture_2.png
    458 x 600 - 93K
    Picture_1.png
    109 x 22 - 5K
    Post edited by evilproducer on
  • PjotterPjotter Posts: 274
    edited December 1969

    Yes, this helps a lot. Thanks. With my large scene I now get almost immediately response to mouse scroll. Good for clearing out it doesn't change the renderings, because I thought this was the case.

    If I understand correct after some searching, choosing for OpenGl or Software depends on the system. My setting are Software.

    What does degradation mode means. In your image, it plays 3 fps and skips the others?

  • Philemo_CarraraPhilemo_Carrara Posts: 1,175
    edited December 1969

    Pjotter said:
    With rendering my CPU is the bottleneck. I know that. But how about running an animation in Assembly or moving around in a big scene. It can get really slow. My CPU is running at 15% average (8 cores) during the animation and my RAM has 2 free GB. So what causes the slowing down process? (I have enabled multiprocessors)

    If I believe what I've read (I don't have Carrara 8), multi threading is not used for everything in assembly room. It looks like you've struck something like that (an eighth of 100% is 12.5% and it's what you get when only 1 core is used).
  • PjotterPjotter Posts: 274
    edited December 1969

    Not sure about that. All my 8 cores are showing activity. But it is not evenly spread. 2-3 cores are taking it the easy way.

  • Philemo_CarraraPhilemo_Carrara Posts: 1,175
    edited December 1969

    Not the same thing. Even is only one thread is used, it can be spread (sequentially) among several cores (even all). Each time the system is interrupting the thread (which is quite often), the said thread will restart on whatever core is available.

  • PjotterPjotter Posts: 274
    edited December 1969

    OK. Thanks for clearing that out.

  • Philemo_CarraraPhilemo_Carrara Posts: 1,175
    edited December 1969

    Pjotter said:
    OK. Thanks for clearing that out.

    I hope I wasn't looking too pedantic :-)

  • PjotterPjotter Posts: 274
    edited December 1969

    No, but don't worry. I'll let you know. ;-)

  • PhilWPhilW Posts: 5,145
    edited December 1969

    As I understand it, more or less only the renderer is multithreaded at the moment, so working in the Assemble room will only essentially be using one core.

  • edited December 1969

    Hi

    bit late to join this thread but I have just realised PhilW's last point.

    I make very complex scenes and the screen redraw moves to a crawl even when simply moving an object - often taking 20 seconds - to a few minutes to update in the assembly room even with all possible interactive render settings set to their lowest.

    Showing the Activity Monitor - the reason becomes obvious - only one core of a possible 16 in the MacPro is being used to calculate the geometry. This really cripples the possibilities of the program and if the Gods are listening, activating multicore processing in the assembly room would be my great wish for future builds.

  • PhilWPhilW Posts: 5,145
    edited December 1969

    It would be good to have the whole program multi-threaded. I assume you have tried using just the bounding box preview when moving stuff, that seems to work OK for some complex scenes I have worked on in the past. Also if you are using replicators, simplify the preview mode for those too.

  • edited December 1969

    Hi PhilW

    Thanks for the response and the suggestion. Yes, tried all that but still taking that long. In fact, wish I had seen this thread a few months ago when I bought a new graphic card figuring that was the problem!

    I am not sure how complicated it would be for the developers to make the whole program multithreaded but it would transform the thing from something that severely limits its possibilities to a very powerful program with much greater capacity. Seems crazy to limit the assembly room, especially given its animation capacity, while allowing multithreading for rendering (which it does very well now)

    Really love the program but it has some amazingly frustrating glitches that persist since its very earliest versions.

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