Getting progress reports from XSI / mental ray?

[wolfinger]

Is there ANY way to find out what XSI and/or mental ray is doing at any point? Specifically I'd like to know how much time was spent calculating the GI map, how much time for the FG map, and how much time total. If possible I'd like to see a realtime progress indicator telling me when, perhaps, the aforementioned prerender maps would be ready.

Reading from the manual, I set the render verbosity level to "verbose", and also directed logging into a file, and then restarted XSI. I can now see the normal operations output to the file as I'd expect, but nowhere do I see any messages from the renderer. I've tried previewing in the viewport and a preview render into a window.

What am I missing?

[richard-sher]

Go into File>User Preferences>Scripting/Logging and check the box next to Real-Time Message Logging. (you will only have to do this one time)

Go into your render options, click the Logged Messages tab and set the Severity Level to "Progress Reports" (you will have to do this for every new scene)

Open up the script editor and leave it open while you render. All the information you are asking for will appear in there as your scene renders.

[fuzy]

How big an impact does this have on the rendering time in opposition to rendering with no messages from renderer?

Ivanp.

[richard-sher]

Almost none. All in all, it might add 1 second or so to a render with a lot of feedback, much less for a smaller render.

[wolfinger]

Thanks Ed! I have something to add though...

What you said is exactly what I did (plus the writing to file bit), and while I later noticed that it works just fine in Windows, nothing would seem to happen in Linux. This was at the office.

Now, at home, I launch XSI from a terminal window (instead of from a menu like at the office), and alas I discovered that the renderer output is printed right out to the terminal instead of the XSI scripting log. While this is in my opinion a better choice, it means that XSI has to be launched from (or in) a terminal to get the progress in Linux.

Do you think this is a bug, or a conscious choice from Softimage?

[richard-sher]

Do you think this is a bug, or a conscious choice from Softimage?

Hmm... I have no idea. We use Linux here work, but only for rendering. (not for the artists to work on.) So I have never run into this problem. I'd suggest sending a mail to support@softimage.com and letting them know that this is happening. So, if it is a bug they can fix it. Or If it is not, they can document it. (If it isn't already)

[wolfinger]

Originally posted by support@softimage.com:

In reply to:
Already logged 63921 XSI - Request to be able to filter out the verbose
and progress output from Mental Ray when interactive rendering

Also docbug logged # 77691 verbose from Mental Ray is not in Linux
scripted operator (like on NT) but in shell instead.