Just to clarify, i don't have any problems with Indigo the renderer, but the plugin, oh my god, the first version couldn't even match the camera, i would rather shoot my pc than installing it again. I have nothing but pure psychotic hatred for it

On the other hand i am VERY happy with iray, it is very well done, other than the inconsistent bit depth issue and a couple of hiccups here and there it was money well spent, my blood remains at a proper temperature.

I must admit, that was pretty damn funny when you said you were lost etc.
Anyway when you exported your smoothed mesh for Iray with iClone in min mode did you enable smooth mesh in the real-time settings located in iClone preferences? otherwise by default it doesn't actually export subdivision to the Iray project.
and just a recap to simplify what I said why some projects can take longer:
Some of my models are heavy because they are setup for physics (uses animation) and maybe you want to add displacement on top of that such as my water..  an additional part of the issue I realized last night that might be contributing to the slow down is that Realtime physics was enabled while exporting when it probably should of been set to bake.. so while exporting it was probably calculating physics in real-time at the same time generating models rather than relying on prebaked accurate physics. If this is the case then real time physics should automatically be switched to "by frame" as soon as the render/export button is pressed or at least tell the user that they must bake the physics first.



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ok, we are on to something here, i was about to redo the test, so i opened the test project, and the first thing i did was a preview render focusing on the avatar shoulder to see if the smoothed mesh appeared in the render, i can confirm what 4u2ges mentioned, it doesn't export the smoothed mesh but memory consumption is bigger. Then i enabled smoothing in preferences, tried to preview render and what i got was a MEMORY LEAK (not yelling, just adding emphasis). My 11gb of vram where used up completely. Of course the render failed because the gpu was out of memory, also my ram usage is brutal, and it remains so even after closing the render window. Gpu memory returned to normal usage, 5.6gb, which seems reasonable.


As you can see i have 32 gb or ram and iclone is using 28 gb, the iray window is closed but i don't have my memory back.

system specs
i7 4930k
32gb ram
gtx 1080ti

I'm also providing a link to the test project so that anyone can test it and report memory issues
https://1drv.ms/u/s!AsSSs0N-TpMthOZjRBlE8NLn79Rmjg?e=Mq3u3N

excellent! welcome to the party! i'm glad you narrowed it down to a leak. I've created a support ticket but maybe you can reply with that info on the feedback tracker post 

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I hadn't noticed this mainly because i still use cc2 avatars, because of the lack of the AE in cc3. So i smooth with tessellation

just adding more info to this issue, tessellation is exported using minimal mode. So if anyone wants to smooth cc3 characters tessellation is the best option at the moment

Just want to share some notes and a tip about exporting tessellated mesh for animation with Iray.

Exporting scene to Iray with tessellated objects (characters specifically) is quite unstable as of now, when it comes to the vertex/face count in the exported scene file. The discrepancy could go up to 50%.
In the video below I do consecutive exports with different types of smoothing and as you may see every time tessellation is used (after exporting with other methods) it produces different file size (meaning vertex/faces count in the export is different).
It ranges from 12Mb to 23Mb for the same scene, same settings and without moving a camera!



This is really bad and must be fixed. I'll submit it to FT when I have a chance.

Now a TIP: Tessellation is sensitive to hidden mesh (and I am not talking about hiding objects or item of cloth in the scene manager).
So before adding a tessellation to the character's body and getting ready for Iray scene export, bring it to the CC and hide body mesh as much as possible.
You would safe substantially in the export.
For instance, in the above video tessellated Jade's body mesh was resulting in 12Mb scene file (well at least at the beginning).
After I hid some body mesh in CC and sent her back to iClone, the exported scene file went down to 7Mb.
That is a lot of savings per single character when you are exporting animated sequence.

Finally the main difference between subdivision and tessellation is, that if you apply tessellation to the body, you must apply it to all clothing items and a hair (in some cases) as well.
That is because tessellation results is slight mesh inflation and the pock through might occur if body is not *synchronized* with cloth. While subdivision retains the mesh intact volume wise.

Reallusion is claiming that the issue is now fixed in v 7.7 but I'm still getting the same issues.  Has anything changed for you?
https://www.reallusion.com/FeedBackTracker/Issue/Critical-add-the-option-to-change-smoothing-displacement-levels-in-the-stand-alone-render-animations-can-take-days-to-export-with-smoothing




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