Cinema 4D Render Times

Deadline
1

Not specific to Deadline but we are experiencing extremely slow render times when rendering via Cinema 4d. Our farm is 19 slaves, each is minimum 12 core 1.6GHz with 32GB RAM. They are all blades so no real graphics cards. We have tested some jobs and found that rendering through the farm can take over 4 times longer than rendering on a single 8-core Mac Pro tower. We have not tested the render on the single tower over the network but our data storage device (both repository and where the scene and textures are located) uplinks to the network at 20Gb. We know it isn’t the most efficient solution but I cant see it hindering the render process this much.
Anyone have any idea on how we can improve the process? All other programs (Maya, 3DS, AfterEffects) do not see this kind of difference. Renders through the farm are typically 3x faster than local renders.
Looking for any pointers

Thx in advance -
Joel
MBA Productions

2

The thing that usually helps speed things up is larger task sizes. That’s the number of frames Deadline asks C4D to do before exiting.

By default we have it at one frame, which means the scene and Cinema4D itself need to reload after each frame is rendered.

If it’s not higher, try something in the 10-20 frame range and see if that helps with the overhead. The ideal size all things being equal is the number of frames to render, divided by your 19 Slaves. The downside there is if you need to pause the job, or if a frame goes badly, you’ll need to modify the task size before continuing so that it doesn’t re-render things that are already complete.