Ray tracing After Effects slow 3D Text

[Walter Soyka]

Ray-tracing is slow. Think seconds per frame, not frames per second. The ray-tracing renderer can be accelerated with certain CUDA-capable NVIDIA cards, but it’s still not as fast as other plugins like Video Copilot Element 3D or Mettle ShapeShifter.

Ray-tracing is already optimized to use all cores. It is not compatible with the old multiprocessing mode, but note that your CPU usage is nearly maximized. Using more RAM somehow would not make it go faster, because the CPU is already the bottleneck.

That said, your memory & multiprocessing settings (which do apply for classic 3D renderer comps) are non-optimal; you’re set up to starve the system of memory. You’re better off reserving a little more RAM for the system and other applications: at least 4 GB, maybe 6 GB or even 8. You’re also better off allocating more RAM to each background process. Even though this will mean fewer background processes running, they will each be able to run much more efficiently with more RAM. (Again, this won’t help you here with the ray-tracing renderer.)

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Shawna Brookes]

Thanks Mr. Soyka,

Its hard to believe an, i7 5820k is a bottleneck, granted the 5960x and Xeons exist. But Im just an entry level pro-sumers getting their feet yet. Granted this is an entry level build for a workstation.

One time, I got the usage up to using 5 and 6 GB of RAM during rendering but I cannot achieve those numbers again. I might try again.

But even still, the black and green graph shows 3 to 4 GB of RAM being used but when the process list is displayed, it shows all the streams using a significant amount of RAM. I really don’t know which to believe.

So do GeForce video cards CUDA help support the final export rendering with the CPU, or is the CPU strictly the engine for final rendering?

Thanks

[David Cabestany]

I remember I read somewhere that this technology never really worked as it was supposed on AE, so they actually decided to scrap it or at least stop further developing it.

Having said that, I think ray tracing on AE sucks big time and you’re much better off using a 3D application or at least Element 3D to fake it, anything better than ray tracing in AE.

Unfortunately your machine specs are very limited for this kind of stuff.

Best,
D.

[Walter Soyka]

[Shawna Brookes] “Its hard to believe an, i7 5820k is a bottleneck”

I’m not using bottleneck in a pejorative sense, but rather a technical one. Ray-tracing involves a LOT of calculations, and your CPU is already running at nearly 100% utilization. Even if more system resources were available, it wouldn’t speed up the render because the CPU is already being fully utilized.

As I mentioned before, a solution like Element 3D or ShapeShifter Ae will get you extruded text and render a lot faster than the slow ray-tracing renderer does.

[Shawna Brookes] “One time, I got the usage up to using 5 and 6 GB of RAM during rendering but I cannot achieve those numbers again. I might try again.”

RAM usage does not indicate rendering performance. Don’t chase RAM usage, chase the fastest renders.

[Shawna Brookes] “But even still, the black and green graph shows 3 to 4 GB of RAM being used but when the process list is displayed, it shows all the streams using a significant amount of RAM. I really don’t know which to believe.”

The process list shows memory usage in kilobytes. You have to divide that number by 1024 to get megabytes, then again by 1024 to get gigabytes to compare to the RAM summary.

[Shawna Brookes] “So do GeForce video cards CUDA help support the final export rendering with the CPU, or is the CPU strictly the engine for final rendering?”

CUDA is a technology that allows the GPU to perform more generalized computation, not just draw graphics faster (like OpenGL does). CUDA accelerates the ray-tracing renderer ONLY, in both preview and final renders. OpenGL accelerates the fast preview for ray-tracing. Neither CUDA nor OpenGL accelerate the standard “Classic 3D” renderer.

Finally, I’d mention that the ray-tracing renderer will eventually be replaced [link] by integrations with C4D and 3D plugins.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Shawna Brookes]

Thanks for the response. I hope all this will help other new users to sort out the whole CUDA, openCL, NVIDIA, AMD, rendering, ray tracing questions that are so common.

Aside from 3D rendering, I am quite pleased with Ae and Pr performance. It looks like I will now need to learn about these side programs available fro producing 3D texts and objects and import them into Ae.

I will see what Google has to reveal and what others may recommend in this thread.

Knowing this about ray-tracing and the need for a secondary program, this will determine future upgrades. My current video card has a ‘re-welded” plastic fan blade that broke off due to my fault, so the next upgrade should be a graphics card and / or more RAM?

Any thoughts and opinions?

Thanks again!

[Shawna Brookes]

So I downloaded the CS
11.1 Ray – tracing benchmark from the net and decided to test my computer.

As the AE file came, I left it as is and started the export render and was severely disappointed. I stopped it only after 20 minutes of rendering for final output. The estimated time was over 2 and a half hours.

Its seems that its CPU only that is doing the work and the AMD graphics card I have does nothing to aid in rendering the output file. What a disappointment.

Again, for those who are interested:

My set up is:
X99 Intel 5820k core
16 gb of standard ram, not overclocked, all working fine
256gb SSD Samsung Evo boot/windows/adobe suite disk
32 gb SSD output/ scratch disk
ASUS Pro motherboard
AMD Radeon r7 360 video card, 2 gb vram

However, searching on the net I see people running NVIDIA cards of various numbers and generations 4xx, 5xx, xx, 9xx getting really fast rendering times. I am envious.