exporting scene time for subsequent frames during animations

[tenz148]

Hi,

Currently testing Arnold and Vray, I have noticed that when I launch an animation (both in Render Sequence and Batch), the time from launch to first frame is similar for both renderers, but from the second frame on, Vray exports the scene much faster whereas Arnold seems to take the same time as with the first frame. The result is that even if the render time per frame is the same, the whole animation takes much longer. Is this normal?

I have made several test and the behaviour is more or less constant.

Other thoughts:

It is interesting that if I stay in IPR and just move the timeline, arnold updates and finishes every frame very fast.(IE whe I make a playblast with Arnold viewport).

Also I dont understand why, when I use Render Sequence , it needs to open Maya Render view instead of using Arnold Render View.This seems to slow down things a bit I feel.

Thank you!

[Stephen.Blair]

There's no incremental exports. MtoA (not Arnold) has to export the whole frame.

Render Sequence goes through Maya, so we end up having the Maya Render View open up. It's a limitation, you can't stop it.

Render Sequence is a convenience for Maya users who don't have Arnold licenses, and therefore cannot use batch render.

[tenz148]

Oh, I see.

So I understand that the absence of incremental exports is something fixed in Arnold for Maya and cannot be solved. (I had heard about that -loading each whole frame- for GPU renders but I did not know that it could happen to some CPU renders as well) For quick renders of heavy scenes it is a bit of a pity but I understand.

Thank you very much for your quick reply!

[tenz148]

Small follow up. A cool workaround could be to set up the playblast so that it stays in every frame a predefined amount of time (5,10sec.etc) to give more time to arnold IPR to sample the image in the viewport. ( to my understanding, going that way would avoid reloading the scene)

PD. I have edited a bit the question to make it faster to read since a lot of the details are irrelevant looking at the answer.