Might be a silly question, but why is Nuke the only app I cant use while Rendering?

[sv0]

It might seem like a stupid question, and can I just this is while running 3dsMax in low thread mode and can I also say Nuke is the ONLY program that COMPLETELY becomes unusable when rendering - I use 3dsMax and normally browse forums, write emails, use Photoshop etc. whilst rendering in the background with almost no performance hit. Running Vray in low thread mode from the system properties, and runing 3dsMax as a low priority thread seems to have NO EFFECT over nuke - why is this?

Is it something to do with video card memory? Is nuke setup to use this, and this is why I can't use the program while rendering? I've got a moderately decent machine also - Dual Quad Xeon, 8 gig of RAM, 765 meg graphics card 8800 GTX...

Can anyone shed any light or is there a way to change Nuke's setup so it can be usable? It would be nice to have a workflow while I can do comping on a project, whilst waiting for another project to render.....

Many thanks

[debris]

We noticed the very same behaviour here. We sometimes use our Workstations to support our renderfarm. Running XSIBatch in idle priority usually doesn't affect the performance of these machines at all. Photoshop, XSI, ZBrush etc. don't notice XSIBatch is running, except the scenes rendering use a lot of RAM. But even then it's possible to continue working.
With Nuke (using 5.1v2 at the moment, but all 4.x and 5.x version showed the very same performance hit) it takes minutes to even display a PAL sized image reader node (no rendering involved) when the workstation is doing something else. I use a 8-core 4Gig vista 64 machine, and even when I set the renderjob to use only 1 core at idle priority it's impossible to use Nuke.
I of course know you should use dedicated workstations for compositing, but this is insane...
Would be great if there was a way to fix this!

[hugo_guerra]

Could be a OS problem, I render in Mac OSX and I can still edit in final cut in SD.

I have a 4 cores 2.66 mac pro with 8gb ram.

[gozirra]

I've noticed the same thing here.
8 procs Xeons on XP

[sv0]

Maybe it's a problem with Xeons, I'm 8 core Xeon setup on XP 64bit with 64bit Nuke 5.1v2. but with 5.1 it was impossible to work also.

Anyone with a different processor setup find the same problem?

I can do ANYTHING with ANY OTHER program, but nuke just won't play right. I can even do two lot's of rendering with 2 versions of Vray running, with absolutely no problems - can still surf the net, write emails, work in AfterFX, work in Photoshop etc. etc. as long as 3dsmax is in low thread mode, but Nuke will just not respond until i've stopped rendering, even if Nuke process is running in high priority mode.

I also do reckognise it's better to have a dedicated comping machine, it's just strange that Nuke is the only program that works like this. Isn't there some hidden preference that can be changed!

[hugo_guerra]

Send a email to Nuke support, they are fast and they can tell you if it is a bug.

[sv0]

have done - will report anything back here if we get anywhere!
I wonder if it's a Xeon thing though - anybody on other processor's ever notice you just can't run Nuke when rendering in the background?

Thanks for your replies.

[sv0]

Responce from the Foundry:
Tried it and this is working fine:


I was wondering if you could try the following :

Try running the background render process set to only use 4 threads and nuke set to only use 4 threads. You can do this from the command line by using the
-m4 flag (command line operations can be found in the Nuke user guide on page 384).

If you could try this and let me know how you get on.

Kind Regards