I am trying to transition from the obsolete iray to Cycles for basic product renders–and apparently large chunks of Cycles are identical to iray so it shouldn’t be too hard–but huuuh boy. Latest thing is that I have a 4K normal map for some texturing, in a material used on possibly hundreds of surfaces in a model, and initializing a raytraced view or render, every single time, takes literally forever, it seems like the texture is being loaded anew for each mesh that uses it. This is was not a problem with iray.
Have you tried other rendering plugins for product design?
Is this for Rhino 8/PBRs?
If so, Rhino 8 Cycles endlessly and needlessly “prepares X for first time use” on me; be it GPU procedurals, or PBR maps.
Ehm, it is not a message from Cycles, but rather from OpenGL for Rendered mode. It is something that @DavidEranen has been trying to find a usable solution for, but afaik no good one has been found yet.
It shouldn’t. Best to share a file that shows the problem, otherwise I’ll have to try and guess what you’re trying to do.
I have here a file with over 250 materials with lots of texture images in each. Many materials have either bump maps or normal maps - they work just fine. So a problem file would be much appreciated.
1 Like
I have just seen this while going into Raytraced mode on my laptop. And I see it regularly on my PC.
Is this because when you call Raytraced, it actually calls Current → Rendered → Raytraced? Sometimes the process can be seen where you temporarily drop into a Rendered viewport just before it goes to Raytraced.
OpenGL (or Metal) is a fallback for Raytraced indeed - essentially a somewhat limited form of Rendered mode.
Anyway, the texture map is not the issue for @JimCarruthers shared with tech support via email. Rather the huge amount of objects is what kinda bogging things down. There are 1700+ objects, for rendering optimization that can be brought down to 7 if you extract and combine render meshes per material.
If you don’t want to do that then at least consider using block instances. There are big amounts of geometry needlessly repeated.
Big texture maps aren’t a problem per se, until you’re using lots of different huge texture maps. That can lead to (GPU) RAM exhaustion. As a test I have tried rendering with a 24K HDRi map (from polyhaven.com) for instance. It is possible - but not necessarily smart.
If there’s some way to do that while maintaining the (programmatically applied) texture scaling, I’m all ears. Downstream people trying to render these in something else would probably like that.
Just saying, Iray chews up and spits out these “huge” models with these textures with no problem–I mean, Cycles RENDERS them plenty fast aver taking 5 minutes to load it up. I only need to bother with extracting and joining meshes on animations of much more elaborate models. It’s usually not even worth the extra overhead to enable instancing in iray except on like the 500+million-poly-model I used to make the 124MB normal map that’s choking Cycles. This model is boring everyday junk that needs zero optimization effort.
Also I just checked and V7 Cycles crushes the file perfectly fine also.