Render Mantra pbr in 17.0.352.
The scene is a particle system with few instanced spheres,motion blur enabled and 256x256 resolution.
It is something totally achievable in subsecond times In almost any software I can think of.
Every frame took 18 seconds in Mantra, but just the first frame after launching the rendering, when in render view, then I can ask for whatever frame without stopping the renderer and it get processed in less than a second.
Render to disk on the other hand took the exact 18seconds for every single frame always costing you the entire “initial warmup” making it totally unusable for any trivial task as it gets 30x times slower than the render view counterpart.
In both cases the renderer never get past 30% cpu usage.
Is there something I'm missing to get better performances out of render to disk?

and?

On windows, I once found that I could speed up the render startup significantly when running as admin.

The Render View keeps a mantra session running and processes new frames on the fly, whereas rendering to disk spawns a new mantra for each frame you render. For trivial stuff, the difference is pretty much all startup and initial setup (which IPR rendering does once on first render, or on demand as geometry changes).

kahuna031
On windows, I once found that I could speed up the render startup significantly when running as admin.

thanks, I have tested it and I get 18 sec in Mplay with both standard and admin.

twod
The Render View keeps a mantra session running and processes new frames on the fly, whereas rendering to disk spawns a new mantra for each frame you render.

Doesn't it make sense to make an option to force the “listening/interactive” behaviour?
I wonder if it can be made in scripting.

I guess that also other renderers do the same, but Mantra with 17 seconda of warmup per frame is out of any trivial sequential task.
Do you know a renderer I can couple with houdini with faster warmup times?

Paolo Oliverio
Doesn't it make sense to make an option to force the “listening/interactive” behaviour?

Hopefully this will be addressed by the revolution in the upcoming LOPs. Overall it's bemusing to chat to vendors with 200 -> 80K cores and how they collectively groan when Mantra is cranked up.

Paolo Oliverio
Do you know a renderer I can couple with houdini with faster warmup times?

I've a fair bit of experience with Redshift: one thing that certainly speeds up renders is its option to not reload the entire scene on each frame render. You can specify a set of objects that do need to be updated, and it'll just keep everything else cached ready for the next render.

And of course it's blazingly fast, next to mantra, but it has a number of other limitations, some minor, some major. Mantra is a car, Redshift is a train. Great to have both options. And then there's Octane, and a number of CPU-based renderers available too.

Can you put a hip file up for us to look at? Even with my limited exp of mantra 17 seconds sounds insanely long.

Paolo Oliverio

kahuna031
On windows, I once found that I could speed up the render startup significantly when running as admin.

thanks, I have tested it and I get 18 sec in Mplay with both standard and admin.

A 17 second start up time is outrageous and shouldn't be happening.
a) When you turn on verbosity in the render, what does the timing report?
b) Do you get the same behaviour if you render directly to disk files (i.e. render from the ROP)?
c) How long does it take for Houdini itself to start up?
d) What happens if you set the engine mode on mantra to “none”?

To me, this almost sounds like there's some kind of timeout happening, possibly with license checks? Or maybe loading a lot of different plugins?

This post (https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/16960/) from a long time ago seems that they solved the problem with a DNS lookup issue.

mark
A 17 second start up time is outrageous and shouldn't be happening.
a) When you turn on verbosity in the render, what does the timing report?
b) Do you get the same behaviour if you render directly to disk files (i.e. render from the ROP)?
c) How long does it take for Houdini itself to start up?
d) What happens if you set the engine mode on mantra to “none”?

when I set verbosity from ui it shows nothing in the houdini console is there a different console for mantra?
I also tryed mantra -o consolewait in command.if so How can I show it?and to show houdini console I do an actual printf in vex as I didn't find any other way to show it up.
houdini takes more or less the same time it took to start the first render.
I tryed to switch to standalone license but it takes the same time for both starting houdini and rendering.
how can I set the engine mode on mantra to none?In rendering engine I just find the “normal ones” ie pbr.
Today it went from 18 to 9 seconds for whatever rendering even just a plane.

3-9 seconds sounds normal for a trivial scene. There will always be a little spool up time for an external process, and for the translation script to convert your scene to a mantra scene description file.

On my system, I see a 3-4 second spool time for mantra, whether engine mode is ‘none’ or ‘basic’ or ‘full’.

@Paolo if you are still around, can you please try setting the env variable


On Linux this reduces the 3 delay between frames, i.e. the warm-up, to about 1 sec. This is about the same as rendering with ray-tracing and non-pbr shaders.