Lumion Support Center

Support for unlicensed users => Post here if you can't find your License Key => Topic started by: Member37123 on June 04, 2012, 01:15:03 am

Title: background rendering
Post by: Member37123 on June 04, 2012, 01:15:03 am
I'm testing Lumion 2.2 (educational).
How does the background rendering work? Only in Pro version?
I'm using an Asus gtx 260m with 6g ram and I can't seem to finish a rendering without corruption or choppy dropped frames. I know this machine is marginal, but is there anything I can do to make it work better?
Title: Re: background rendering
Post by: Morten on June 07, 2012, 12:18:23 pm
Hi bighotel, apologies for the late reply.

Background rendering is only available in Lumion Pro
(it's a tickbox in the rendering settings):
http://lumion3d.com/specs/ (http://lumion3d.com/specs/)

The feature allows you to do basic tasks while Lumion is rendering, e.g. checking your emails or editing Word documents.

1) Can you show us what you mean by "corruption and choppy dropped frames"?

2) Does this happen in all scenes, even simple ones, or just in a single complex scene?

3) Please run "DXdiag" in the Windows Start menu -> Click on "Save All Information", and attach the dxdiag.txt document to your next post (Click on "+ Additional Options" below the text field). This allows us to check which Windows version and hardware you are using.
Title: Re: background rendering
Post by: Member37123 on June 08, 2012, 06:21:55 am
thanks for the clarification.
as far as the dropped frames thing --maybe that's not the best way to describe the problem...I've ONLY had success rendering to Frames for editing in premiere
if I try to render an .mp4 directly, generally the rendering starts normally, then after a few minutes the screen goes black--white - black....etc  finally the machine restarts --
so I render to .png and I still get the black screens but sometimes I get a complete clip of frames-
sometimes the machine dies--usually around 150 frames---I've attached the dxDiag text file--maybe you can diagnose.....thanks
Title: Re: background rendering
Post by: peterm on June 08, 2012, 10:04:53 am
Seems the 260M is somewhat more than marginal.

The GTX260M has a benchmark of 705 (http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html) compared to the minimum for simple scenes recommended of 1500 (http://lumion3d.com/forum/f-a-q/lumion-2-minimum-hardware-requirements/).

There are a few things that can help rendering such as:
1. turn on Low Memory mode
2. reduce screen resolution to minumum supported
3. only start render from a re-boot ie everything starts off min and clean
4. temporarily kill any taskbar apps not required
5. minimise your scene
6. reduce the number of effects and the quality level of effects, especially AA
7. ensure the resolution of the textures in the scene are as small as possible balanced to quality needed.
8. render only a clip at a time
9. render to the lowest possible output resolution and star quality as needed
10. set ambient shadow correction to 0.

Some of these help the GPU, others help the CPU for compression to the final mp4 format.
Title: Re: background rendering
Post by: Member37123 on June 11, 2012, 03:48:09 am
thanks for the info