Hi Nate @dastickup
Thanks for your file, we received it.
We believe your render initialization slowdowns are linked to the activated camera optimization feature, by default this feature is disabled for the final render as cycles should be able to render billions of instances, but here it was voluntarily activated also on final render.
We believe each time your camera is moving, your Geometrynode scatter is changing, therefore cycles and blender needs to re-enitialize the scene in preparation for the render, as the latest triggered a scene change.
You didn’t experience this when the plugin is disabled because in Gs 5.4 the plugin is responsible to animate the camera frustrum information in the nodetree (so effectively the camera frustrum cone wasn’t animated and the scatter didn’t change on each frame). Can you try to disable the camera-optimization to avoid experimenting slow initialization time? This way blender shouldn’t identify any changes in your scene between frames
Could you let us know what specific part of the initialization is taking so long? is it the BVH computation, or is it the “Synchronizing objects” phase?
Hi Dorian! Thanks for investigating this issue and getting back to me so quickly! So I did try to deactivate the Cam-optimization on each item in the geo-scatter systems of the scene. I guess I was a bit sloppy here because some were activated and some were not. But I did try deactivating it for all the items and unfortunately the initializing render times didn’t really improve. I’ve sent an email to you with a download link to 3 videos showing the rendering initialization process.
The first video is with the scene as I sent it to you with some cam-optimization boxes checked and some not
The second video is with all the cam-optimization boxes unchecked. (i actually even went back a second time after this video to make sure the camera logo for the final render under cam-opt was also unchecked, but it didn’t help.)
The third video is with all geo-scatter visibility deactivated
With geo-scatter visible the time rendering was 32 seconds for each frame, with Blender still going through the long initialization process both with and without cam optimization. For me it didn’t change the time. There was definitely a while spent on BVH and synchronizing objects, but it was along with a bunch of texture loading as you’ll see which doesn’t show up as much in the third video.
To be honest I’m kind of a newbie to this level of technical stuff haha. Like when I saw cam-optimization I assumed its a good thing just from the wording so that’s why I must have checked it in the first place. Most of the terms in the initialization process I don’t understand either so I hope you’ll forgive my ignorance lol. Please let me know if I’m still doing something wrong.
One more thing lol, I just tried to update to Geo-scatter 5.5 to see if it could improve the times, but in my project (i saved a new copy) when I pushed the button to update the node-tree it gave me some python errors. I’m on Blender 4.2.3, i don’t know if this is a problem with my machine, or my project? Sorry for so many problems!
Hi @dastickup
It looks like the 30sec of initialization time buildup are all linked to Geometry node. Botaniq sometimes use old particle hair system which seems more effitient at init time for extremely large scene.
Note that the old hair system will soon be removed from blender entirely tho
Oh wow, thanks for your investigation! So geometry nodes is the real bottle neck? Hmm I will try scattering some of those other objects like the mountain trees using the hair system then. I love geo-scatter’s control tho, no other plugin has its features. Thanks again for letting me know!
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