Please remove limit on amount of CPU cores to support capacity of modern computers

[mmmaarten]

Using a computer with 24 cores here I find it quite underwelming and dissapointing to see Moho in 2023 still only using 4 cores to render. Using all cores on this machine alone that would make rendering 6 times faster than it is now.
I can't think of a good reason on why the amount of cores should be limited by any software tbh and even if there would be a reason to be able to limit this, than at least I would expect this to be optional and/or configurable by users, never hardcoded. Especially on animation software where speed is important I wouldn't expect any limitation on speed and capacity, but to take advantage of everything the machine has to offer to make renders as fast as possible.
I understand this was made for older computers in the past, but it's unnecesarily limiting a lot now. Could this limit please be removed, so we can use the full potential of our machines? That would be really appreciated! Thanks!

[Greenlaw]

Moho does allow you to increase the number of render cores under Preferences. The listed maximum depends on what's available on the computer. (For example, on my Surface Laptop Studio the limit is 8.) Before you increase this value, make sure you have enough RAM to support the extra data load. This depends on the complexity of the project and resolution size.

The last time I checked Moho's performance with increased render core settings, I didn't see a huge increase in performance, so it probably needs some work. That was quite a while back though and I probably need to check this again with the latest version.

Right now I just leave mine set to the default value of 4 and performance is pretty decent for my HD and FHD renders. I like to break out my layer passes using Moho Exporter (for compositing,) and total render times are rarely more than a few minutes.

[Greenlaw]

Something else: I need to check this to be sure but I would expect render performance is better when rendering to an image sequence (like PNG) vs rendering directly to a single movie file. If you get a chance to test this, let me know how it goes.

You can compile the image sequence to a movie file after rendering them, and that will probably still be faster than rendering the movie file directly from animation.

[mmmaarten]

Moho does allow you to increase the number of render cores under Preferences.

Ah okay. I had searched for quite some time for this on this forums and found an older thread where you and others were asking the same, but without any conclusion (open thread) that it was actually changed/added after that. That was around 2018/2019 and I thought it was the last post about it here, so I wrongly assumed that was still the case as there was no follow up, at least not that I could found so I didn't continue to search in the software for it. My bad.

But now that I tried it, it doesn't change much to the original question I suppose, because having all these extra cores barely changes anything:

Just did a test now:
- 4 cores render of 240 frames of the animation I'm creating: 1'28"24
- 24 cores of the same (with max render cache size on 200): 1'12"72

So I don't know, but thes 20 (!!) more cores barely do anything extra. Even when I up the max render cache size to 1600 (1600 what?), it's even slower, or stays the same (so that's probably not the bottle neck): 1'13"72

I'm using a RTX4080 here and the system has 64GB mem, so that's pretty decent I'd say.

So I agree with yout that there is definitely room for progress/optimalisation in this regard.

[Greenlaw]

I just checked for Moho 13.5.5 on my Surface Laptop Studio and I actually have the Render Cores set to 6, not 4. I must have decided some time ago that this was optimal for me on this computer. I'll check my notes to see why I chose this setting.

Of course mileage may vary depending on a particular hardware setup and what's being rendered.

[mmmaarten]

Alright, maybe it wasn't good to use all cores, because it also uses at least one core for applications.

So for the test I tried allocating less cores now: from 24 cores total:
20 cores (max cache 1600): 1'10"90 (slightly faster than using all cores)
12 cores (max cache 1600): 1'07"61 (noticable faster than using all cores)
6 cores (max cache 1600): 1'10"89 (still faster than using all cores)



[edit] BTW I wonder if it makes a difference that the preferences speak about using(virtual) THREADS and not talks about hardware CORES

[Greenlaw]

Thanks for digging up the old thread and posting the link. I'd like to revisit that thread.

I'm using a RTX4080 here and the system has 64GB mem, so that's pretty decent I'd say.

So I agree with you that there is definitely room for progress/optimization in this regard.

The graphics card won't make a difference because Moho doesn't use GPU to render with, only CPU. But 64GB should plenty of RAM even for a heavy Moho render.

You probably won't see much difference with a light render project. You should test the performance with something heavy like Chucky's Crustacea project. The longer render time provides better comparisons for different render settings. The original version of Crustacea might be a bit long for quick testing so I use a slightly cut down version for my tests.

Anyway, while I really can't complain about the render speeds I get now, I'm always up for performance improvements. Hopefully we'll see that in a future release.

[mmmaarten]

Yeah, I think the bottleneck is in the beginning of the render. It seems to have started doing some frame rendering (we see the images change) while the progress bars of the cores aren't even there. It takes some time for the progress bars to show up, so not sure what it's doing there that takes so long. Perhaps when doing more than 10 sec video (240 frames) it's more benificial to have more cores.

Anyway, thanks for the quick response and the thinking along!

[mmmaarten]

I just checked for Moho 13.5.5 on my Surface Laptop Studio and I actually have the Render Cores set to 6, not 4. I must have decided some time ago that this was optimal for me on this computer. I'll check my notes to see why I chose this setting.

Of course mileage may vary depending on a particular hardware setup and what's being rendered.

Ah, I see I missed this post. To answer this one; I always render to image sequence for the exact same reason as you described, so I already did that!

BTW do you know if there is a way to keep the export-folder in the project for exporting the video? (without overwriting the default) Right now every time I do an export I need to choose that path again which isn't ideal)

[Greenlaw]

I'm probably way off base but I always imagined Moho is loading multiple instances of the project, or 1 copy per thread. This is why I think the RAM requirements can increase as the number of threads increates--each instance is loading and running another copy of Moho (at least the rendering part) plus all the animation/artwork data found in the Project. If so, this may explain the lag at the beginning you're describing.

But I'm totally speculating here. I really don't know how Moho manages its render data. This description is what makes sense to me and I'm hardly an expert on this topic.

[Greenlaw]

BTW do you know if there is a way to keep the export-folder in the project for exporting the video? (without overwriting the default) Right now every time I do an export I need to choose that path again which isn't ideal)

I always use Moho Exporter. It has two options:

1. You can use the Destination drop down, which lists the most recently used output directory. I don't like this because it requires extra action on the part of the user, plus the items don't stay on that list forever.

2. Save and Load a custom Profile. The profile file includes all the render settings plus the preferred output directory for each project file in the profile. This still requires action from the user but it's more reliable.

Another reason I like Moho Exporter is that it can break out the Layer Comps settings and generate a project file for each Layer Comp...all with a single mouse click. Tip: set your render destination for the 'master' file first before you click the button. This way, each project will use the same output folder. Don't worry about all the renders going into a single folder because Moho Exporter is smart enough to save each Layer Comp to its own sub-folder.

And if you save a Profile of this, the profile will automatically load all the Layer Comp projects at once.

Tip #2: If you like to increment your versions like I do, but don't want the version number to appear in the final render, save an un-numbered master file for final rendering. Then, when you're done editing the animation, overwrite the master file and load your Profile.

At work, we have custom tools to handle all that automatically but the above is what I do when I render my personal projects at home.

Hope this helps.

[Greenlaw]

BTW, ideally, I feel there should be an option to set a preferred output directory in the Project Settings window because every project (i.e., scene or shot) typically needs to be rendered to a unique directory. This has been the case at every studio I've worked at.

I've been asking for this option for a very long time and I'm still hopeful we'll get this in a future version of Moho.

[mmmaarten]

BTW, ideally, I feel there should be an option to set a preferred output directory in the Project Settings window because every project typically needs to be rendered to a unique directory.

Yes I agree. Either inside the project settings or it being saved when changing the path in the export dialog. I would add to this:
- Please also save the other export settings in the file (like image sequence vs video, fileformat etc) (I have this set as default now, but not all project needs to use the same defaults per se. I would expect this to be project related)
- Please save the path relative to the project file when it's in a subfolder of the parent folder the moho file is in (so that it still works when renaming or moving the project folder) and if not than absolute

[Daxel]

BTW, ideally, I feel there should be an option to set a preferred output directory in the Project Settings window because every project typically needs to be rendered to a unique directory. This has been the case at every studio I've worked at.

I've been asking for this option for a very long time and I'm still hopeful we'll get this in a future version of Moho.

That would be super helpful.

[mmmaarten]

I always use Moho Exporter.

Thanks for the tips! And yes, I love these comps! Very useful and I will definitely going to use them often to add effects and do editing in external software, like Fusion!

I searched everywhere in Moho Exporter tho, but can't find anything called profile. I understand that we can save configurations, but those don't save the render folder location. So you must mean something else.

What do you mean by profile? Do you mean a record line in the Moho Exporter list or is there something else you're talking about?