Massive slowdown in Render with Stencil Layers

Development Rendering
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1

Hey there,

I´ve seen a massive increase in rendertimes in the Movie Render Queue, when using Stencil Layers.

I don´t know when this happend, but somewhere between 5.3 and 5.6 i guess.
The same sequence without additional stencil layer renders in about 2-4 minutes, with stencil layers it takes around 30 minutes, rather than the linear increase for each renderlayer (so, with only one layer enabled, it should only be like 4-8 minutes)
Warm up frames render fine, but then I have a long wait til the actual render starts and the rendering gets super slow.

Anybody else experiencing this?

I can´t remember changing any specific rendersettings in my default render preset (1/8 TSR, rendering to Multilayer EXR with DWAA, “accumulator includes alpha” checked, a few console variables and the default game overrides).

Still possible its related to something in my projects settings, I just don´t have the time to do some proper troubleshooting with a clean project at the moment, so wanted to check if its only me or if anybody else experienced that kind of slowdown.

2

Nothing has been brought to our attention afaik. You can use the different stat commands while rendering to see what its stalling on. Just hit the tilda key when a MRQ render window is up to get to a command line. Is there a different between MRQ and MRG?

1 Like
3

Haven´t tried that yet. I´ll see if I can test this and report back.

4

Hello, we have the same problem here, render goes from 10 min to 90min for the same thing (5 stencil layers)

tried the tilda key but nothing appear on screen.
any idea how to deal with that ?
we have an urgent project to render

thank you

5

Oof yeah, you’re right. Even with just empty layers, it slows down. I’ll report this to the devs. In the meantime, I would use Movie Render Graph. It’s a better solution for rendering in layers anyway.

6

Does movie render graph not have these issues?

I tried it in a previous version of Unreal but had to give up on it due to some bugs or missing features, but its on my To Do List anyways…:slight_smile:

7

Any layer you add is technically another render so it does add some render time. But not exponentially like this.