Best Octane Scene Optimization Tips for Faster rendering

VRAM is probably one of the single most important considerations when using OctaneRender®, since VRAM determines what you can actually get done in any given shot — if your scene or parts of it doesn’t fit into VRAM it is not going to render. Out of Core is useful to address VRAM overflow, but it can only go so far, and performance will suffer. So many scenes come into Otoy Tech Support that is not using VRAM effectively. This guide will offer suggestions to help you create scenes that are optimized for Octane. 

Here are the highlights covered by this guide:

• Layers
• Naming
• Instances
• Duplicate Materials
• Octane Materials
• Octane Object Tag
• Map Type

Now let’s go into details!

Always break your scene down into layers In Cinema 4D. This way, you can keep your Object Manager organized and easily control what is displayed at any given time. Layers can work hand-in-hand with the Solo function in Cinema, but using Solo is more cumbersome when it comes to looking development and lighting. Layers instead offer the ability to solo whole layers, including layers that contain scene lighting. They will also help to isolate aspects of a scene that may be having issues, or, worse, causing crashes (whether Cinema, Octane or some other plugin). 

Name everything. Doing so helps keep the scene easy to read and organize. Naming is also a great help with xpresso and works well for tracking down errors.

Cinema materials need to be converted by Octane on the fly, and that conversion takes time — in some cases, much time. The conversion occurs and is then loaded onto your GPU card every single frame. Fortunately, Octane can convert these materials into Octane format on demand, by opening the Live Viewer and choosing Materials > Convert materials in the Live Viewer menu bar.

Scene complexity will often hide opportunities for optimization and sometimes, you cannot see the forest for the trees. The best way to manage complexity is to organize your scene into logical chunks. Use the Layers panel in Cinema to organize scene elements however you wish. By putting scene items into their own layers, it is easy to focus one on thing at a time and solve one issue at a time.

In addition to the Cinema 4D Layers panel, there is a tool called Viewport Solo which has two options, single and hierarchy. The Solo function will hide everything else in the scene, allowing you to focus only on what has been selected at the time the tool as pressed. The layer system is superior to solo, as layers can also be solo’d, but there are times where the Viewport solo does the job needed. It is a nice complement to layers.

If you need to have multiple copies of the same thing in your scene, use the Instance generator in Cinema 4D. In the case of a cloner, choose the Render Instance option. The VRAM savings will become more apparent as you have more instances in your scene. You will hardly see that Used Memory value climb. However, if you had plain copies, you would see the User Memory value climb. You can check this yourself by using a cloner and switching between Instance and Render Instance values. Render Instance will always be lower.

Always apply an Octane Object tag to your scene objects. This tag will give you options that Cinema cannot do as efficiently, such as using subdivision to smooth your objects at render time. Doing so is better than using the built in Cinema 4D SubD generator, as the file transferred to the GPU will be much lighter in polycount and transfer more quickly.

Materials should be in Octane format for the best results. For example, you have multiple materials in your scene, they should be unique. Duplicate materials will take up twice the space in VRAM. If you must have copies of objects with the same materials (that cannot be instanced, for some reason), then make sure that you use only one material applied to those copies. You can check to see whether you have done this correctly by checking the assign tab on the material. You should see multiple entries, one for each character that uses that same material.

Make sure to properly set the Map type of each Image Texture correctly. The auto function will try to guess, but for grayscale or alpha images, it’s best to set the Map type value specifically — this way, only the VRAM actually needed for that image is allocated, as opposed to more. If VRAM is allocated, but not used, it is just wasted.

Unfortunately, not everything is possible on a slow and weak computer with little VRAM. Simulations, High Poly Modeling, or complex animation simply won’t work on your PC. But there is a solution! iRender provides high-configuration rental services to help you save time and costs in the rendering process and it is one of the render farms highly recommended for Octane.  We provide dedicated servers for Octane users. In particular, we have servers with Single and Multi-GPU servers: 1/2/4/6/8x RTX 3090, one of the most powerful graphics card currently available, in particular: 

•  1/2/4/6/8x RTX 3090 with 10/24 GB vRAM capacity, fitting to the heaviest images and scenes. NVLink/SLI requested for bigger vRAM.
• A RAM capacity of 128/256 GB.
• Storage (NVMe SSD): 512GB/1TB/2TB.
• Intel Xeon W-2245 or AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3955WX CPU with a high clock speed of 3.90GHz.

The servers’ configuration of iRender not only surpasses the minimum hardware requirements of Octane but also exceeds the recommended requirements. Octane supports multi GPUs on one machine, increasing rendering performance multiple times. This is one of the main reasons we recommend these packages for designers to have flexible choices based on their budget and time.  Let’s see rendering tests with Octane render on servers at iRender:

Some other outstanding features  of iRender: 

• Friendly user interface: The user’s interface is designed easily to use. It takes just a few steps to get started. In addition, users can request extra services to make full use of iRender servers, for example, expand image threshold, increase the size of network drive (Z:), open port, install NVLink, and change hardware. Surprisingly, you get all of these services for free.
• Flexible Pricing: You will be charged on a per-minute basis. Depending on the type of server you choose, we will issue you an invoice once you shut down the servers, so that you will control your balance easily. Moreover, you can always save up to 20% with our Fixed Rental feature if you are in need of a server for a long time for a large project, we advise choosing a daily/ weekly/monthly rental package. The discount is attractive and helps to save more for your render. 
•  24/7 Real Human Support: If you choose to render your projects with iRender, you can feel extra safe that we have a dedicated CPU & GPU infrastructure and enthusiastic technical supporters available 24/7  to answer any queries you might have regarding your rendering jobs.. 

So, do not hesitate anymore. Let’s become a member of the iRender community today to get FREE COUPON to test our service. We do the rendering, the creativity is yours!

iRender – Happy Rendering!

Reference source: otoy.com