I just found out per chance, as I wouldn't have guessed, that POV
does start about the slowest render possible, when triggered by Moray.
I took 3 different scenes in the range of 10sec. to 22sec. rendertime.
Switched off render to backdrop.
Set up in Moray and POVray the benchmark settings of skyvase.pov.
Did renderings from within Moray with POV settings gui- and render
priority to min and max switched. The rendertimes where identical,
for the bigger file 22 seconds average at 5 runs.
Left Moray open and loaded the file into POVray.
Did runs with priority settings slowest, came down to 22 seconds.
With settings to fastest, 17.5 seconds. On the faster files, renders
from Moray where slightly faster than worstcase priority settings.
Haven't tried with longer renders so far, should turn out about the
same. I mean, I get nervous if I see a machine that's 20% faster than
mine and the guy hasn't spend a dime extra for it, so I do start longer
renders from POVray now.

smb

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smb wrote:
> 
> I just found out per chance, as I wouldn't have guessed, that POV
> does start about the slowest render possible, when triggered by Moray.
> I took 3 different scenes in the range of 10sec. to 22sec. rendertime.
> Switched off render to backdrop.
> Set up in Moray and POVray the benchmark settings of skyvase.pov.
> Did renderings from within Moray with POV settings gui- and render
> priority to min and max switched. The rendertimes where identical,
> for the bigger file 22 seconds average at 5 runs.
> Left Moray open and loaded the file into POVray.
> Did runs with priority settings slowest, came down to 22 seconds.
> With settings to fastest, 17.5 seconds. On the faster files, renders
> from Moray where slightly faster than worstcase priority settings.
> Haven't tried with longer renders so far, should turn out about the
> same. I mean, I get nervous if I see a machine that's 20% faster than
> mine and the guy hasn't spend a dime extra for it, so I do start longer
> renders from POVray now.
> 
> smb

  Having any other application open when rendering will steal CPU cycles
from the rendering process. The fact that Moray is sitting there waiting
on Pov to finish plus the overhead of a GUI intensive program like Moray
just adds to that burden. I wouldn't have a expected 20% difference but
it's possible. You said you also for the second test left Moray open then
loaded into Pov. I would be interested to see the difference if you had
Moray shut down altogether. On really long renders I shut every program
on the system down that I can and it makes a big difference in total
time.

-- 
Ken Tyler

mailto://tylereng@pacbell.net

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Ken wrote:
> just adds to that burden. I wouldn't have a expected 20% difference but
> it's possible. You said you also for the second test left Moray open then


I noticed the same thing.  For my final Astronaut picture, the Gargoyle
and the various skulls I've been doing lately, I export to POV, close
Moray and render in POV when i'm ready for final(hah!) renderings.  
Going through Moray was about 3x slower than just pov by itself.  Of
course, my stuff is all meshes which take forever for POV to parse, and
i'm doing off kilter aspect ratios which also seem to make moray much
slower.

Post a reply to this message

Scott McDonald schrieb:
> 
> Ken wrote:
> > just adds to that burden. I wouldn't have a expected 20% difference but
> > it's possible. You said you also for the second test left Moray open then
> 
> I noticed the same thing.  For my final Astronaut picture, the Gargoyle
> and the various skulls I've been doing lately, I export to POV, close
> Moray and render in POV when i'm ready for final(hah!) renderings.
> Going through Moray was about 3x slower than just pov by itself.  Of
> course, my stuff is all meshes which take forever for POV to parse, and
> i'm doing off kilter aspect ratios 

I love this scottish plug-ins.

> which also seem to make moray much
> slower.

Who's ever in the final.


smb

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Ken schrieb:
> 
> smb wrote:
> >
> > I just found out per chance, as I wouldn't have guessed, that POV
> > does start about the slowest render possible, when triggered by Moray.
> > I took 3 different scenes in the range of 10sec. to 22sec. rendertime.
> > Switched off render to backdrop.
> > Set up in Moray and POVray the benchmark settings of skyvase.pov.
> > Did renderings from within Moray with POV settings gui- and render
> > priority to min and max switched. The rendertimes where identical,
> > for the bigger file 22 seconds average at 5 runs.
> > Left Moray open and loaded the file into POVray.
> > Did runs with priority settings slowest, came down to 22 seconds.
> > With settings to fastest, 17.5 seconds. On the faster files, renders
> > from Moray where slightly faster than worstcase priority settings.
> > Haven't tried with longer renders so far, should turn out about the
> > same. I mean, I get nervous if I see a machine that's 20% faster than
> > mine and the guy hasn't spend a dime extra for it, so I do start longer
> > renders from POVray now.
> >
> > smb
> 
>   Having any other application open when rendering will steal CPU cycles
> from the rendering process. The fact that Moray is sitting there waiting
> on Pov to finish plus the overhead of a GUI intensive program like Moray
> just adds to that burden. I wouldn't have a expected 20% difference but
> it's possible. You said you also for the second test left Moray open then
> loaded into Pov. I would be interested to see the difference if you had
> Moray shut down altogether. On really long renders I shut every program
> on the system down that I can and it makes a big difference in total
> time.
> 
> --
> Ken Tyler

Yup, shure it does. I was more at the fact, that communication between
Moray
and POV should possibly be improved in that Moray hits better settings
there.
What I will do next, is compare setups for the texture preview render,
as it
is so comfortable to work from within Moray. Of course for longer
renders it's
best to shut down all other stuff. That goes even for all this
background gadgets
that one sees best opening the taskmanager.

smb

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Hi smb, you recently wrote in moray.win:

> I just found out per chance, as I wouldn't have guessed, that POV
> does start about the slowest render possible, when triggered by Moray.
> I took 3 different scenes in the range of 10sec. to 22sec. rendertime.
> Switched off render to backdrop.
You did use the INI file that Moray generates for that file, right?
I've had people wonder why POV was slower/faster when started with
Alt-G only to realize that they had the POV file loaded. This makes
POV render with the currently active settings, instead of the ones
when Moray is loaded.

As long as Moray (or any other program that uses a GUI extension to
get at pixels) is loaded, POV-Ray sends rendered pixels to it and thus
will be slower.

- Lutz
  email : lut### [at] stmuccom
  Web   : http://www.stmuc.com/moray

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Lutz Kretzschmar schrieb:
> 
> Hi smb, you recently wrote in moray.win:
> 
> > I just found out per chance, as I wouldn't have guessed, that POV
> > does start about the slowest render possible, when triggered by Moray.
> > I took 3 different scenes in the range of 10sec. to 22sec. rendertime.
> > Switched off render to backdrop.
> You did use the INI file that Moray generates for that file, right?

Yup, just straight hitting the render button.

> I've had people wonder why POV was slower/faster when started with
> Alt-G only to realize that they had the POV file loaded. 

Nope, hadn't loaded the file in POV.

> This makes
> POV render with the currently active settings, instead of the ones
> when Moray is loaded.

Yes, so I had identical settings for both apps, max_trace_level, etc.

> 
> As long as Moray (or any other program that uses a GUI extension to
> get at pixels) is loaded, POV-Ray sends rendered pixels to it and thus
> will be slower.

Oops, that's hot to know. As far as I know, this is not documented in
POV,
or is it?
This should eat up a lot of time anyway. But, I guess, one could stop
this
by unchecking 'use guy extension' in POV. Will try later.
Did try, no, surprise, I had identical rendertimes from within POV,
Moray sitting beside it or not.

I sent a bug report concerning the TE not writing the path of a bitmap
for
POV, will there be a maintenance release not so far further down the
road?

> 
> - Lutz


smb

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Hi smb, you recently wrote in moray.win:

> I sent a bug report concerning the TE not writing the path of a bitmap
> for POV, will there be a maintenance release ....
While I haven't looked at the bug report yet, it's probably not a bug.
Did you use View|Dependencies in Moray before exporting? If so, did it
bring up an error dialog about not finding a bitmap?

- Lutz
  email : lut### [at] stmuccom
  Web   : http://www.stmuc.com/moray

Post a reply to this message

Lutz Kretzschmar wrote:

> Hi smb, you recently wrote in moray.win:
>
> > I sent a bug report concerning the TE not writing the path of a bitmap
> > for POV, will there be a maintenance release ....
> While I haven't looked at the bug report yet, it's probably not a bug.
> Did you use View|Dependencies in Moray before exporting? If so, did it
> bring up an error dialog about not finding a bitmap?
>
> - Lutz
>

No Lutz, I was simply creating a standard texture with an image map
and a bumpmap as normal, opened concerned folders and selected
the bitmaps with TE's browser, but TE's preview silently rendered black.
Checking in the read-only window for the code to the right, below the
preview window, in the TE, revealed, Moray was not adding any path
before the name of the bumpmap bitmap to use, so POV couldn't find it.
First I thought, clever, so POV's now got kind of a dir command, as both
bitmaps where the same and that I had done anything else wrong, but
exporting the scene and correcting the entry rendered fine.

smb

Post a reply to this message

Hi smb, you recently wrote in moray.win:

> No Lutz, I was simply creating a standard texture with an image map
> and a bumpmap as normal, opened concerned folders and selected
> the bitmaps with TE's browser, but TE's preview silently rendered black.
Hmm. The ME is supposed to ask whether you want to add the path to
those bitmaps to the Search Path.

The way Moray works with any external files is that it only stores the
filename. Whenever the file needs to be exported or opened, the Search
Path is searched for that filename and the resulting fully qualified
name is exported. If, therefore, you are seeing only the filename in
the ME text preview window, then that file cannot be found on the
Search Path. Exiting the ME, assigning the texture to an object and
then doing View|Dependancies will correct this error.

- Lutz
  email : lut### [at] stmuccom
  Web   : http://www.stmuc.com/moray

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