Digital Art Zone

When rendering a scene—draft, final, whatever—how big do you typically set the “render squares?”

I often use 16 pixels because I believe in many threads doing a lot of “little” work. But on machines with only 4 cores (as mine currently has) it is painful to watch no matter what size. 

Does the scene content affect your choice? I found that the render will often work extra hard on hair and such; thus many cores with a small “render square” lets several processors chew on producing the hair instead of having one big “render square” cover everything and leave all the work to a single core.

I really need to stop procrastinating and build my 24 core server! I can hardly wait to see Carrara fly on that.

UNRELATED: blasted Texan summer power grid brownouts…was working on a long scene render and forgot to save the work before starting…

It depends.

Larger tiles are more efficient because it takes a slight amount of time to restart a thread when it finishes but, as you have seen, if one tile gets stuck on a complex part of the image then the other tiles may complete the rest of the image minutes earlier and time is wasted waiting for that one area.
This is especially true when waiting to go onto the next frame in an animation.

So really the only way to judge is to try a small test and see where it bogs down, then set tile size so that each core finishes as about the same time.

I think that bigger tiles use more memory too, so that may also be a consideration.

I tend to render large images so the default usually works for me, I generally don’t go lower than 32.

Thanks RP!

I had to expect an “it depends” answer since there is an infinite variance in the possible scenes.    One day I may get brave enough to venture into animating with Carrara (I did do a few minor bullet physics clips…cliche material there).

I finally started building the big server ... but I’ve hit a snag with getting the power cables plugged in. Hopefully a quick trip to an electronics store will remedy that.

When you build a 24 core server make me one I am in!

RichardChaos - 30 June 2012 03:50 PM

When you build a 24 core server make me one I am in!

Fair warning Richard, it is not a Mac machine…

I just got back from Fry’s Electronics…I hope I have the correct cable convertors so I can finish building this machine.