Looking for suggestions on quick rendering of mantra in houdini 11 for testing purposes. What parameters do you suggest in reducing in mantra when using liquid shader with particles? My machine seems to max out. It takes from 5 to 10 minutes for a 320x243 size. What am I doing wrong???

thanx a bunch!!!

Unfortunately the make my renders better and quicker button has not been implemented yet.
The first place to look is not the mantra ROP but your geometry. Has everything been written to disk ? have you deleted all the spare attributes. If you using ray tracing have you thought about what you want your liquid to trace against. ? .Are your shadow maps optimised ? .Better still,just post up a scene.

rob

Thanx for getting back to me so quickly.
Darn!!! no magical button yet…

It's a simple particle system so no spare attributes. Yes, I wrote to disk.
I rendered a version with environment mapping and no env. map with default ray tracing. No shadow maps and everything else is default settings.
Are you reccommending to post a hip file of my scene?

In the past in renderman, I used renderman shading rate to help speed the rendering time. Does mantra has something similar to that? I played with pixel samples in mantra but it didn't seem to make a difference, yet…

thanx Rob!

In the past in renderman, I used renderman shading rate to help speed the rendering time. Does mantra has something similar to that? I played with pixel samples in mantra but it didn't seem to make a difference, yet…

Well if your scene is very simple as you say it should render very quickly using a default mantra ROP. So posting up a scene will be the quickest way to debug whats happening. Do check from the menu .Windows>performance manager > then you can check node cook times.

regards Rob

Always helps to post a file. Machine specification is interesting as well.

The fluid particle surfacer creates a lot of polygons. Doing a polyreduce might decrease rendertime a lot without any quality loss.

Also switch to PBR or Micropolygon rendering. The ray tracing one is slow.

haroda
..

In the past in renderman, I used renderman shading rate to help speed the rendering time. Does mantra has something similar to that? I played with pixel samples in mantra but it didn't seem to make a difference, yet…

thanx Rob!

hi ,

i havent used rman but from what i read on docs ; mantra is the same tech ( with few exceptions , oc )

.. since first tests will keep taking longer to render , you can read the docs .. meanwhile


.cheers

There is an inverse equivalent of Shading Rate called Shading Quality available on your Geometry objects under Render>Dicing. In renderman increasing Shading Rate will speed up your renders, but in Mantra Shading Quality = 1 / Shading Rate. So a Shading Quality of 2 = Shading Rate of 0.5, so dropping the quality below 0 should speed things up for preview renders.

Thank you all for your reply!!! I shall try all of your suggestions.
Got side tracked on another project.

thanks again!!!