Hey,
as I understood, these files are the reason, why there is nearly no pre-caching time, when start the rendering.
This is very clever and very time saving! Never saw this before.
But how do we deal with the huge files?
For example I am using a wooden floor texture wich is "33MB", the .cntx file is "800MB".
Is it possible, that we get a function to activate and deactivate this feature?
When I import textures from different folders, wich I do very often in my workflow, I am getting everywhere .cntx files.
That can look very messy, especiaelly, when you are testing different textures and it generates everytime this files everywhere.
For now I am sorting them manually in my "tex" folder.
But there we have the issue with all these big files.
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Huge .cntx Files
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Administrator Posts:
Apr 23, 2020 21:35
Hi vblackrender.! Yes, they are needed to save time for continuation uses (reading original files, extracting from compression, converting to internal images). They are unpacked uncompressed bitmaps in a format that is used for out-of-core textures in the chain "Disc -> RAM -> GPU.
The Arnold renderer is doing the same thing with them. These files are generated in the same place as their original source file. It's safe to remove them searching for "*.cntx" in Windows when the project is not going to run again I will fix the problem with few solutions: 1) compress cntx files 3x - 4x or even more; 2) make some options to organize them separatelly in some special folder.
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User Posts:
Apr 23, 2020 22:09
Hi Kirgman, that sounds very interesting!
I have compressed one of the big files with winrar. It falls from 800mb to 200mb, but that took nearly 20-30 seconds. I could imagine, that this would take a lot of time when compressing all textures at once. Maybe, you can use a different technique.
Thats a great idea! I am really looking forward to this!
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Administrator Posts:
Apr 24, 2020 05:48
No, it shouldn't be WinRAR compressor or anything general. It will be some custom algorithm which unites similar texels at vicinity, doing that on GPU and using on GPU with on-the-fly decoding. It should be fast and without overhead (initial compression time will be added, but disc output time reduced because of smaller size).
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User Posts:
Apr 24, 2020 09:23
Maybe you can generate a cntx folder automaticly in the folder where your project is located (And have the possibility, to change the output location for this files in the settings additional).
When you import a texture, all cntx files will land there. That could look like this.
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Administrator Posts:
Apr 26, 2020 20:23
This is an option, but need to figure out if there is any existing project folder when the scene is just created but not yet saved in some location. This can be a tmp location in Cinema directories which can become polluted and unnoticed at all. Redshift for example saves such files to just one known location. Maybe it's a good default option.
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User Posts:
Apr 27, 2020 15:02
In Redshift, it generates automaticly the cached files in a folder. It was about 3gb.
I remember that because, this took too much space on my ssd. so I moved it to the other harddisk few days ago. I think that could be the best solution, better than the project folder idea.
Edited:
- Apr 27, 2020 15:02
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Administrator Posts:
Apr 28, 2020 21:07
I can tell that it's better to store these cache files... in SSD! Because access from them is fast. In Redshift, CentiLeo or Arnold.
In render time if you get the situation of out-of-core textures then SSD is great, but HDD may create unnessarry slow-downs that you will probably pay no attention. Just need to get used to remove them avery time the project is finished. Maybe some that folder stats scaner printing for data size could help. Automatic cache removal may be not working at least in case of crash or maybe if the files are needed. I have bought just a single 1TB SSD for 3D scenes storage, will make demos with that 
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User Posts:
Apr 28, 2020 22:52
I think I need to make that, too! Maybe you can put a button in the settings like "empty cache" to clear only the cache for your project you have opened, manually with one click, whenever you want 
And a second button like "clear all cache" to clear the complete cache from all projects. Dont know, if this would make any sence. Definately could that be a better solution, rather than automaticly emptieng the cache.
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Administrator Posts:
Apr 29, 2020 14:05
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Administrator Posts:
Jun 9, 2020 16:44
Hi vblackrender., I still haven't made more tools for cache files but there is some more detailed info in new manual about these cache files + the larger picture about entire system.
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User Posts:
Jun 10, 2020 17:25
Thats great! Thanks!
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