Really Slow Batch Renders On Quad Processor

[mattness]

Hey all,

I am new to Maya, and am trying to batch render an animation of a fairly simple scene in Maya 7 on a mac using Mental Ray. (I am using Mental Ray, as it seems faster than software, and better quality than hardware rendering) My problem is that the render is still really slow, a couple minutes to render a 640x480 frame. I am on a pretty zippy machine. A quad G5 with 4 gigs of memory. I am mainly an After Effects user, and complex 3d renders (complex for AE) fly on this machine. I made sure to select 4 threads (or 4 processors) before I submitted my batch render. When I look at the MayaBatch process in the Activity monitor, I can tell that out of a possible %400 cpu, MayaBatch waffles between %0 processor use, and a number between %30-%80. AE uses a constant %200 or so when it does a render. The CPU usage graph shows short low spikes in all of the processors at once as it renders, consistant with the processes's cpu vascilation between a low % and %0. It also seems to be only using about 60 MB of memory. Out of a possilbe 4 Gigs! Is there some preference somewhere that I have missed that lets Maya's Render process make better use of my processors and memory? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

-Matt

[joojaa]

Actually a G5 as a processor is quite slow when compared to a new amd or intel of comparable price (which is why applie switched over, the G5 was only ever fast for a very short while even tough mac people kept hyping otherwise).

Anyway this actually sounds like the renderer is gone to waiting for resources game. Where theres some slow connection on the hardware, usually its some texture, or possibly a cached reference that gets waited to arrive form disk/ network.

[mattness]

Apparently, this is a pretty common bug in the mac version of Maya... I finally found a thread about it on the Maya-OSX forums. A lot of Mac people seem to have the same problem in 8.5. It astounds me that they haven't fixed it if this bug was in 7 as well. Apparently, the solution is never batch render out of Maya, start batch renders from the terminal instead. The same scene at the same settings that was taking about me about 2 minutes per frame to render, is now rendering at 7 frames per minute.

[joojaa]

Ahh that yes its a feature of the osx system itself, it applies to a lot of programs not just maya.

The feature is that applications launched trough the gui are always in compatibility mode of some kind and have no 64 bitnes, less memory etc. Well thing is i never launch renders form within mya anyway so betch for me means commend line automatically. Mong other things this prevents maya frm launching the applications with equal access as the command line.