Category

Tutorials

Jan 15
0

Review of V-Ray RT GPU 3.5 (Based on Beta 2)

By | Blog, Dabarti, Our creations, Software, Tutorials, Updates | 2 Comments

Introduction:

It has been over 7 months since the release of earlier Service Pack and we will be getting another free upgrade in Q1 of 2017. It’s now in public Beta stage. In this post I point out and review newest features and improvements of upcoming V-Ray RT GPU 3.5. I will focus only on GPU side of the engine as I think it deserves way more exposure than it gets. While it may seem like a small addition to V-Ray CPU (Adv) it’s in fact full-blown production rendering engine that paves the way for better and faster rendering workflow.

Over the course of last months I’ve been crazy enough to keep installing latest Nightly builds of V-Ray RT GPU on regular basis and abusing the hell out of it. As I’m sharing all the my testing data, bug reports and improvements ideas with Chaos Group team I also feel partly responsible for its current shape.

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Nov 04
3

Short guide to GPU rendering with V-Ray RT.

By | Blog, Dabarti, Tutorials | 39 Comments

The aim of this guide is to help with switching to rendering on GPU with V-Ray and has all the basic information needed to better understand advantages and limitations of this approach. Everything below this point is based on our experience with using V-Ray GPU (RT) as our main production renderer.

1. Why GPU for rendering?

It all started around 18 months ago when we decided to do a hardware upgrade to get better 3ds Max viewport performance. So we installed new GPUs (it was GTX970 4GB) and decided to see how things improved with rendering on GPU with V-Ray RT. We loved it!… Well, to be honest not straight away. It took time to change the mindset, but the speed boost and interactivity were there to help and sooth any pain caused by some V-Ray Adv features missing.

It wasn’t the first time I tried rendering on graphic cards. But back when GPUs had 512-1024 MB of memory it wasn’t really a production ready solution (at least for us). It changed with launch of Nvidia’s maxwell cards that came with 4GB on board, did cost fraction of their Quadro brothers and were much faster and more energy-efficient than earlier generation. This alone made it possible to render 70-80% of our scenes.

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Jul 18
0

Using V-Ray denoiser tool (vdenoise.exe) with send to scripts + Backburner submission.

By | Dabarti, Tutorials | 11 Comments

General Idea.

This is going to be quick tip for anyone who would love to easily denoise sequence of exr files with vdenoise.exe without typing in commands manually. This workflow could also be used for number of different tools or scripts like encoding video with ffmpeg or converting exr sequence to mov using DJV.

The trick is to use windows send to scripts. If you don’t know it yet, in Windows you can create custom .bat files that will run commands from under right mouse button’s send to menu. This is very helpful if you want to automate some file processing tasks and save a lot of time in the process.

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Mar 16
1

Building 4xGPU rack-mount rendering node

By | Dabarti, Tutorials | 50 Comments

Few months ago we build 2 custom GPU rendering nodes. I’ve decided to share all the specs of what we ended up buying to make it easier to anyone who wants get something similar.  

List of components:

  1. Rack mount case – Chenbro RM413 4U + 8 PCI rear back window (55H103413B007 + 55H173413B001) – 142 Eur + 15 Eur  = 157 Eur . You have to unscrew the rear window that comes with the case and replace it with extended one or instead look for Chenbro RM41300-FS81 which already has 8 slots. I wasn’t able to buy this one but it’s out there.
  2. Motherboard – MSI X99A XPOWER – 390 Eur . This one is relatively cheap and has 2 x 1Gbit Ethernet connection.
  3. PSU – Enermax Platimax 1500W – modular with 90-95% efficiency 290 Eur, enough to supply power for all GPUs,
  4. Memory – Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB DDR4 x 4 = 211 Eur.
  5. CPU –  Intel i7-5930K 3.50GHz 15MB BOX = 560 Eur
  6. SSD –  Samsung 250GB 850 EVO = 85 Eur.
  7. OS – Windows 7 PRO = 90 Eur

Total without GPUs = 1783 Eur

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