SGI: Computer Graphics

foetz wrote: i picked the lobby where the game starts .

How long does it take to render it on your setup?(and what is your setup by the way?)

nongrato wrote: How long does it take to render it on your setup?(and what is your setup by the way?)

i didn't remember so i pulled the project from my archive and ran it again. it took 8 1/2 minutes on a dual 1ghz box with mentalray 2.1. i didn't care tho since it's a still so 30min would have been just as fine

the major point why it's rather heavy is the antialiasing which i set to min/max 2/4 which for mentalray standards is quite high and the rgb threshold was at 0.1. however i set it to front faces only and disabled 3d textures and reflections in the render settings. i also had 2 mentalray post-effects and one bionic light shader.
in addition i used quite large textures even for todays standards (hdr not counted). some were 8mb per file so per object with bumps, specular and so on it sums up.
for rendering on 2 cpus mentalray took 86mb for each.
the scene had around 35,000 polys in total. mostly caused by the debris obviously

at first i started the scene with softimage 3.8 on an indigo2 but at some later point i switched to 4.0 on an onyx350. i don't remember why but i reckon it was something that didn't work with 3.8. anyhow i used nothing that wasn't available in earlier softimage versions because i tried to get as close as possible to what capcom used.
since i had mentalray 2 then i did tried a GI render tho but it didn't have the atmosphere i was looking for. the blue was too intense; almost like glowing. so as you can see in the attached pic the lighting is faked


EDIT: since "backporting" scenes with softimage is relatively easy i hammered hrcConvert and loaded the thing into 3.7 on an R4400/250 indigo2 running 5.3. for such cases i also (ab)use my server-octane as a render slave so an R12000/300 was working on the final image, too. also note that with softimage 3.7 we're using mentalray 1.x which is available as mips3 on the octane and mips1 on the indigo. softimage with the scene loaded used only 7.5mb ram in total btw
for the first try i was a bit more careful and kept the antialiasing to 1/3 instead of the 2/4 i had with the onyx. i fired up mentalray standalone on the indigo as master in verbose mode so i got quite some stats.
the octane's run used 64mb while on the indigo the mentalray instance only ate 16. in total it took 6m:46s. 87.03% done by the octane and the rest got filled in by the indigo. however what i noticed later was the missing softshadows despite having that selected. i guess that was the reason why i switched to 4.0 at the time. sure, i could make it an area light but for smooth shadows there you need 6x6 samples at least which takes pretty much forever.
anyway i did a second run, this time with antialiasing set to 2/4. for that the octane needed 74mb and the indigo 18.5. this time the total render time was exactly 14 minutes and i had 78.50% done by the octane and 21.50% done locally. quite interesting to see that upping the antialiasing doubled the indigo's contribution in comparison. the missing softshadows aside the quality of the resulting image was no different from the one made with mentalray 2 on the onyx.

i think that should cover the interesting points. if i missed something just let me know

very cool, foetz. do you think performance on the Indigo2 would be better or worse using IRIX 6.2/MIPS3?

robespierre wrote: very cool, foetz. do you think performance on the Indigo2 would be better or worse using IRIX 6.2/MIPS3?

that completely depends on each program and even the individual task. a while ago i ran some tests with gzip from irix 4 to 6.2 on the same machine. compiled it for each os and ran the same test. the results were almost the same.
anyway in case of a renderer it could be different so i'll just try tomorrow ...

I'd expect a renderer to use FPRs heavily and the separate register file would help.

well not tomorrow after all but right now so one more run
this time using softimage 3.8 with mentalray 1.x which is completely mips3 on both machines. irix 6.2 for the indigo this time. i skipped the lower antialiasing settings and fired up the 2/4 render directly. everything the same as before.
ram usage was almost the same on both machines this time: 73mb on the indigo and 74 on the octane. total time was 13m:11s in which the octane contributed 77.99% and 22.01% came from the indigo. so yes, mips3 on the indigo is slightly faster although that could also be caused by the slightly different versions. the most significant difference tho is the much higher ram usage. nearly 4 times as much which for such a small performance gain is not a good trade off so irix 5.3 wins here i'd say.
and as before the resulting image looks just the same.

something didn't feel right about the rendertimes in comparison. 8min on a dual 1ghz and 14 on my indigo-octane duo ... can't be right.
so i just copied the full softimage 3.8 from the indigo to the onyx and ran the same output file i used for the tests with irix 6.2 and indeed what a difference: 2m:33s. obviously the non-working softshadows caused a serious impact as expected. each mentalray instance consumed 87mb on the onyx.

so by that we have a proper comparison that might help with some choices regarding what to use where ...


EDIT: i moved the last few posts to this new thread for easy access

EDIT2: just for fun now that i had it running anyway i did a softshadow run with mentalray 1 from softimage 3.8 and it took 9m:48s so mentalray 2 is a bit faster.