Scene Optimizer

csteell_c2893e4ab6

How good is Scene Optimizer? Does anyone here work with it and does it reduce render times for animated image files? Cheers

Richard Haseltine

It probably won't reduce render times, unless it avoids the GPU render dropping to CPU (which is its main purpose). With an animation I can see one potential limitation - things that are more distant at one point in time, and so could have their texture size reduced for a single frame render, may be closer at another point, and so require a higher resolution texture.

Matt_Brown

I use it. For me it keeps my file renders on my GPU (12 gb). If they revert to my CPU render times are way longer. However, once the scene is small enough for the GPU I don't know if further optimising will speed things up or not.

st3ph3nstrang3

I mainly use it to refresh the GPU in case it craps out and gives you a black screen. Strangely enough, I don't actually need to do anything within scene optimizer, simply running the script and closing it seems to 'refresh' the GPU and prevent the black screen. That being said, I don't see how using it to remove say bump and/or normal maps wouldn't decrease your render times. Fewer textures present in the scene = fewer calculations = faster render times. As stated above though if you have an animation that starts with the camera far away from a character and then zooms in, you may not want to remove bump/normal maps. All depends on how far away the subject of your animation is from the camera and whether removing those maps would be noticable or not.

Jay Versluis

It's a good product. My GPUs only have 8GB and that can get full fast. It does speed up render times in that distant objects with reduced textures and normal/bump maps don't cause as many ray bounces for Iray. The added benefit of smaller textures is faster render start time as less is transferred to the GPU. For a still image the amount of load time saved can be a few seconds (maybe 10-30), so not that significant - but for animations it's a big time saver if you have to do that 1000+ times for a sequence. I highly recommend it.