Using 3DS Max 2015 and Mental Ray and rtt

[codyrymer]

Recently, ive just installed a GTX 980, and i create 3d models using 3DS max 2015, i was hoping for a faster render times using the RTT for game models when i have my render settings at

 

Image precision = Medium

Soft shadows = 2x High quality

Final Gather: Default

 

Usually my baked textures are at 2048 and 1024

 

The reason im asking is this: When i render, it takes all of my cpu power, all 8 cores at 100%, leaving me room to do things in the background when i am rendering, i have 32 gigs of RAM

 

I was hoping the GTX 980 would take some load off my pc, when i render

 

Is there a solution to this, what am i doing wrong??

[Francisco Penaloza]

Hi Cody,

If you are using traditional rendering with Mental Ray, not I-Ray, then your computer is doing exactly what is supposed to.

When rendering the PC will use all CPUs at 100%.

With Traditional Ray-tracer rendering there is not use of GPU at all, it is not recommended to use your same PC for rendering and work at the same time, because something has to give.

If you still need to do it, you can open Windows Task Manager, then go to Processes and select 3D Max from the list do right click and choose set affinity, there you can select how many CPUs windows will allow 3D Max to use.

If you want to Photoshop or anything else 1 or 2 CPUs will be OK, depending of your Ram usage, this trick may work fine. But this will slow your rendering speed, because obviously you are using less CPUs.

 

If you want to use your Video card to render, you need to switch to I-Ray render. then you can choose GPU only or GPU+CPU. Again while rendering if you only have one 1 video card, your view port performance will drop drastically. The software is designed to use 100% or the resources of your PC.

 

Autodesk propaganda still not clear, and I see several people spending hundreds of dollars in GPU thinking that it will help their workflow, but if you don't understand how the system work it is just waste of money.

Maybe for you would be better to build a render node. so you can keep working while rendering.

 

Dimitri, an artist from this forum is a tech savvy guy that has a very informative website filled with hardware info specifically for Visualization. I would strongly recommend to read before you decide any hardware purchase

 

http://pcfoo.com

 

Cheers

[codyrymer]

Thanks for the help