Hey guys,

I have rendering set to “use all cpus” but this is the load I'm incurring when rendering a little 70x100 image. Just a couple of mesh cylinders and that's it - take a suspiciously long time on my Xeon E5-1650 - 32GB.

I've tried playing with the settings and can't make it go any faster. Any thoughts?

H15 Indie

~Caesar

No shaders applied here at all. Just the default GEO with tubes and I changed them to meshes. There is nothing special about the scene at all. Just about everything is left at default. Tried PBR, Raytrace, MicroPoly…etc. Seems to all render at the same speed.

There's a certain amount of setup and teardown that mantra has to do which is single threaded. With the simple image you're generating, mantra doesn't have time to get up and start humming along with all threads cooking. Also with an image that small, there may not be very many buckets with actual pixels that need shading in them. You could try decreasing the bucket size, but that also introduces a little more overhead, so it's hard to say whether this would actually speed things up or not.

I don't know how long each image is taking to render, but it looks in the screen shot you provided that it got through 8 frames in 16 seconds. In a scenario like this you're probably better off baking out your IFD files and running a separate mantra process on each IFD. I don't know off hand how to best set that up so hopefully someone else can chime in. Though at 2 seconds per frame I don't know if it's worth your effort to set up such a system?

Mark

The main issue is as Mark says. Try a bigger render to see more CPU used.

The real problem is the Windows CPU meters - it aggregates instead of showing the seperate cores causing this common complaint that Houdini is only using 10% of CPU when it's probably using ~90% of one of the cores.

I see - thank you for the responses gentlemen! I'm using Houdini mostly for it's procedural stuff so I can change parameters and generate game assets (sprite sheets) quickly - so the images have to be small and there is not much to them as far as detail and shaders go; it looks like Mantra is “overkill” for those types of images? I did some tests using the OpenGL ROP and I am going to use that for everything until it's time for production, then I'll just take the time and use Mantra for the final images.

Thank you again!