Rendering Directives

The following directives configure rendering.

images

A directory path that is used to find image files (normally, texture image files specified in color texture statements in the scene file). There can be more than one images key; the specified paths are searched in sequence. It is not an error if the specified directory does not exist.

include_path

A directory path that is used to find files included in a scene file with $include statements. There can be more than one include key; the specified paths are searched in sequence. It is not an error if the specified directory does not exist.

reduce_bsp_memory

If set to "on", BSP raytracing uses compression to substantially reduce the size of its acceleration data structures. The capacity for large scenes increases at the cost of rendering speed.

iray_render_mode

Controlling the way iray spreads its work across the available resources. This option has the following possible values:

mixed

All available resources are used. Work is dynamically balanced between the resources to ensure that the time each of the resources needs is the same for all. Thus this has the potential of giving the highest performance when different GPUs are used in one machine. Please note, that if clustered rendering is used this mode is not available. This is the default mode if networking is not enabled.

cuda_dynamic

Only the CUDA capable GPUs are used. Load is dynamically rebalanced between GPUs. Please note, that if clustered rendering is used this mode is not available.

cuda_static

This option is no longer supported. Selecting it will instead use cuda_dynamic.

cpu

Only the available CPU cores are used. iray will balance the work to make optimal use of all available CPU cores.

load_ogl_renderer

If set to "on" then the Iray Realtime (ogl) renderer is loaded. If "off" then it is not. Note that Iray Realtime is a pre-release feature and may cause instability. In particular, under a linux environment, if an X server is not running or RealityServer is not authorized to connect to the X server then RealityServer may crash either at startup or when the renderer is used.

irt_acceleration

Controls the way Iray Interactive (IRT) accelerates rendering performance. Different settings trade off render time versus preprocessing time. This option has the following possible values:

fast_render

Highest rendering performance, at the cost of longer preprocessing time. This setting is particularly effective in scenes with a highly irregular distribution of polygons, especially polygons of strongly varying size.

balanced

Compromises rendering performance and preprocessing time. Render performance relative to "fast_render" mode is highly scene dependent however preprocessing time is typically several times faster. This was the setting used in RealityServer 4.0 and earlier.

gpu_assisted

High rendering performance and very fast GPU accelerated preprocessing at the expense of higher memory usage. Note that this setting is experimental and may result in invalid images being rendered. It also requires a GPU with compute capability 3.5 or higher. On GPUs with lower compute capability, or if preprocessing runs out of device memory, this will fall back to "fast_render".

cpu_load_limit

This value limits the CPU usage for rendering. Where a value of 0 disables CPU rendering and a value of 100 will fully utilise the CPU. A value of 0 here will override disabling CPU rendering regardless of other configuration values.

gpu_load_limit

This value limits the GPU usage for rendering. Where a value of 0 disables GPU rendering and a value of 100 will fully utilise all GPUs available. A value of 0 here will override disabling GPU rendering regardless of other configuration values.