We recently became aware that baking very large animations takes quite some time on RenderStreet. We set out to see what the issues are and how we can improve the baking time. The first impressions was that there’s no chance to improve it, because most of the baking is done on a single thread. But we kept on researching and found there are ways to do it.
The first improvement we made was to enable OpenMP in our Blender builds. This causes at least some of the bake types to use multiple threads. This seems to happen for longer animations at least. This gives us a 2 – 3 factor improvement, at least for fluid dynamics baking.
The second improvement we made is in our internal architecture. We managed to improve the performance of the bake file manipulation by 30 – 40%, especially when we deal with large number of frames and the total bake size goes over 40GB.
In the end we are happy with the improvement and hopefully this will save some time and money for you.
How is baking working for you on RenderStreet? Let me know in the comments.
