Fluids, Network Rendering, Odd Increasing Render Times

[semuta6]

Hi all, I'm encountering an interesting problem rendering fluids (fire) on the network. the render times increase by a predictable amount per frame, say 1 minute per frame with one scene in particular, where the amount of fluid rendered is fairly static (steady burning fire) rendered from an orthographic camera with no movement (towards or away). so in a perfect world each frame should take the same amount of time... I came across this thread:

http://www.highend3d.com/boards/index.php?...rt=#entry242164

which suggests that maya, when rendering on the network, likes to do a runup of the dynamic simulation from whatever frame you saved the scene on to the frame rendered, then goes "oh theres a cache file for this frame", drops in the cache, then renders.. a less than ideal situation in that my shots go from 10 minutes a frame to 1 hr 30 at the end of this particular sequence.. I tried the "hack" for fixing this issue for mental ray anyways, and it seems like things have changed in subsequent releases ( I'm using 8.5) and the mrRenderer.xml file referenced no longer contains the line of code i'd need to comment out to make things right..

am I barking up the wrong tree? does this "run-up despite cache" issue still exist? any way around this now?

anyways, any insight would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

[gmask]

well some ways to deal with it are.. if it only takes 1 minute per frame then render on one computer or render more per job that you issue to the farm so that the time wasted on runup is not for every single frame.

[semuta6]

Yeah, good point, I can work around it somewhat I suppose with larger job packets on the farm.. The 1 minute increase per frame ranges to around 10 to 15 minutes per frame for the big shots. and i have around 105 to render, so this issue is still going to add up to a lot of time wasted. it's unfortunate that a solution was seemingly briefly available but now is gone.. ah well.