Visual render (render bucket) thingy

[phailan]

Hi,
Maybe someone here can set straight an argument with xsi 2 visual render method. The xsi render I have seen began in the upper left and had a zig zag pattern making squares until it eventually made its way to the bottom right to finish a frame. A friend of mine says that the new XSI 2 renders quite opposite, jumping randomly all over the screen until a frame is done.
Is this a setting that can be changed or does mental ray three have some adaptive feature where it decides where its going to render and when?

[devdoka]

The zig-zag behaviour is from mental ray v1.9 and earlier. In mental ray v2 and later, rendering occurs in a counterclockwise spiral from frame center to outer edge. However, if multiple CPU's participate in the render (regardless of which machine they come from), then the first processor will render in spiral fashion while the 2nd thru Nth CPU's will render tiles on a first- come first-serve basis in random order including stealing a few tiles which are a part of the first CPU's spiral pattern.

mental ray does have a switch to control the rendering pattern, but you need to get real down and dirty in the code to flip it.

Matt

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Matt Lind
Animator / Technical Director
Softimage certified instructor:
Softimage|3D
Softimage|XSI
speye_21@hotmail.com