I have a pretty standard interior scene, with a single window and an HDRI background texture. And a few point lights inside the room. Whenever I switch to rendered mode in the viewport, the screen goes black while the render initializes, and it hangs for several minutes on the “updating lights” step. The render eventually begins, and I don’t have any problems with doing an actual render (F12), but I have no idea why it takes so long to get past that particular step.
If it would be helpful to see my scene or workspace, I’m happy to upload whatever.
i have a similiar problem. my hdri is 16k big, and after each change ( for example rotation or make it lighter/darker) it takes long time, to refresh the view. it “hangs” on “Updating lights”
octane/c4d dose not take such a long time to update the image - it goes instant. why it takes such a long time to update in cycles? any ideas?
the default setting for hdri changed in 2.8
in the world settings there’s a tab called setting or something and you’ll find that resolution is set to automatic, you need to set it up to 1024 or 2048 to have a instant refresh but the quality of the lighting will be poor
I set the resolution to manual from automatic and now my renders do not freeze on importance maps. I probably lost 20 hours of time over the last 3 days until I did this.
razin, thanks for pointing this out. Now my computer does not freeze up. When I have set my scene up, I reboot my computer and render and my render completes the process. Some people may also need to increase their TDR value.
Consider creating lower resolution version of high-res environment maps.
They won’t look as nice on flat smooth surfaces or in the viewport, crappy even, but doesn’t matter much on curved surfaces with some roughness. I use scaled down versions, similar in size and compression to the preview ones - and it doesn’t bother me one bit while working. Change to the higher res one for final output only.
Carl are you talking about my hdri? I am using a jpg Rouitoo Park. I think it is 16k but I will check. I am not a trained 3d specialist so I have to research your terminology. Thanks for the advice.
Unless the hdr is really ldr, you can’t use a jpg. If it contains lights, you need to use the hdr (or .exr) version if you want to light with it. For camera plates (not lighting), then massive jpgs may be desired depending on camera focal length (zoom) used. The ones I use while working are only 1024x512 compressed. I tend to use sun&sky or just sky for actual lighting the scene as they clean up faster and doesn’t involve prep time.
Im having same issue on bl283 on my old OSX system.
PS you talk about setting resolution from automatic to manual?!? What is automatic, i dont understand what setting you talk about. There are only manually setting for image dimension
That is something else, that is for how fast the preview should start rendering and what resoultion it should use. 1x is 100%, 2x is half of the image size, 3x 25% of image size. You’ll see the image becomes more blurry but renders faster which each step.
I believe he mentioned the sampling in the world settings. I still see the importance map being slow when using manual settings and using 1024