When rendering, is the whole scene with multiple characters outside render loaded onto video memory?

Only a Noob

Hey, 

Probably a noob question but I could not get a straight forward answer after searching the web.

So, if you have a whole scene/set with multiple characters doing different stuff in different poses, and you take a closeup face shot of only one of those characters thereby in your render camera view the rest of the scene and everything else not in focus is not included, does that complete set which which be outside the render, still get loaded into video memory??? and uses gpu/cpu resources?

If so then is it advisable to delete everything else from the set for that particular render? does making them invisible count?

If not then it would be so much easier as different cameras would take specific shots and the rest of the scene does not use hardware resources......

Catherine3678ab

Well if you are rendering in Iray my understanding is that yes, everything is going to weigh in. The light bouncing all over the place would need to be calculated.

Not sure myself as have read conflicting reports ... but certainly if the excess is deleted it cannot weigh in. {save project, group what you don't want in the scene to a null, delete group - one way}

For heavy scenes, I have read that it is best to save the project. Close D/S, open D/S and load project, render. This clears the memory cache which is rather important. When the cache is full or near full the render slows down big time. {I'm not an expert on this, usually render small sets}.

Be careful though in what is deleted, may desire the shadows from the unseen trees, etc.

Also poorly made models weigh into the calculating times. By poorly made - some of the "free" models I have seen were incredible. Full of mesh nobody would ever see. Such models need to be cleaned up in a modeler such as Hexagon or Blender, etc.

 

nicstt

Everything is loaded onto the graphics card for Iray rendering, that is needed by the card; this is done at the start of the process, from what I understand.

It doesn't matter where items are in the scene, in camera view, or not.

chris-2599934

Only a Noob said:

So, if you have a whole scene/set with multiple characters doing different stuff in different poses, and you take a closeup face shot of only one of those characters thereby in your render camera view the rest of the scene and everything else not in focus is not included, does that complete set which which be outside the render, still get loaded into video memory??? and uses gpu/cpu resources?

As the others said, everything in the scene is loaded into memory. The system has to work out how light bounces around the scene, and that needs to tak account of everything, not just the things that are framed by the camera.

Only a Noob said:

If so then is it advisable to delete everything else from the set for that particular render? does making them invisible count?

Yes, but you don't need to delete things, just making them not visible is enough. I recommend putting each character in your scene in its own group. Then you can toggle the visiblilty of each character (together with their hair, clothes, and any props they're holding) with a single click. You might find it convenient to group other things together too, according to their location in your scene.

Mattymanx

As Chris said, you can just hide them.

But you dont have to make groups if you dont want to.  In the scene tab, if you hold Ctrl+ left Mouse click the eye ball icon on any item in the scene, that item and ALL items that are parented to it will be hidden.  Repeat to unhide of course.