Oops, but there is definitely something strange on your side…
I have not installed 5.6 yet, currently still working with 5.4 as this pipeline works perfect for me,
but even “Size on disk/Größe auf Datenträger” makes nearly no difference on my side:
This applies to all versions, Size on disk a tiny bit bigger…
I brought up the idea of a realtime engine due to the long render time of it… whatever it be Eevee or Unreal Engine, especially given the context of the short. It could have been okay just to use Eevee.
I’m in the middle of looking into a project that will be made using Cycles, so prioritizing an efficient rendering system has been the main focal point. With that, there has to be some strategy involved regarding set design, lighting, samples, light passes, etc.
From a filmmaking perspective, lighting is key especially conveying mood and atmosphere. I recommend a site like filmgrab and browsing through some of the night scenes to get a rough idea. I can pull up a few great examples if needed too.
Yes, that depends on the size of the minimum addressable storage space on the disk. Let’s assume that has a size of 32 KB and Windows puts a 5 KB file in there, then the entire 32 KB will be taken up (for “Size on disk”). The smaller the minimum storage area, the smaller the “overhead” wasted. Now, this particular drive is an 8 TB (gross capacity) Sata SSD in an external USB enclosure. Normally, the files I deal with are not all that small (e.g. individual, rendered frames are between 40 and 75 MB each), so in most cases the “waste” is negligible (a few percent only).
Here is an example of a folder that contains 900 frames for a 30-second animation. The difference between size and size on disk is much smaller than in the UE 5.6 example (these are the same kind of SSDs).
But in the case of UE 5.6 with its 215K+ files, the average size of these files is probably quite small, but they each take up at least one of the minium storage areas (in other words, approx. 94% of the “Size on disk” is being “wasted”).
Ah ok, so this particular SSD is definitely not the best choice for this.
I never heard about this issue, so your 400GB sounded simply ridiculous to me…
I’m not sure whether that is a fair statement: When you format a disk or SSD for the first time, you can set the minimum size of addressable space. I don’t remember exactly, but I think I just used the default values, and these may not have been ideal for this particular use case. So, as far as I know, it’s more a question of these settings rather than the type of drive.
Again, usually this is not much of a problem and the only reason I looked into this at all was because the UE install took much longer than I had expected, or—to be more precise—had been led to expect based on what I had been told before.
As I explained previously, the only reason for the install was to be able to export motions as FBX for iClone that are only available as UE Asset Packages from the vendors. I have currently no interest in games or using UE as a render engine.
I understood that you primarily use UE for rendering; any particular reason why this project is supposed to use Cycles instead? Is that a personal project or client work?
Ok, I still wonder in what particular case one would not want the minimum size as small as possible…
Well, as a matter of fact, I had a “chat” with Grok about that, and it appears that the standard/default cluster size for an exFAT formatted drive of that is size is 2 MB, while the standard cluster size for NTFS is something like 4 KB. So the “mistake” was using exFAT instead of NTFS. That said, when I formatted the drive quite a while ago, I did not anticipate ever installing UE with hundreds of thousands of small files—and for my more usual files sizes, a large cluster size is not much of an issue.
(I seem to recall that for HDDs (i.e. the ones with spinning platters), very small cluster sizes led more strongly fragmented files and to longer seek times and thus slower transfer rates, so at that time, very small clusters may not have been such a good idea either; SSDs no longer have read/write heads that need to be repositioned to find the clusters on the platters so “seek times” in that sense are probably no longer relevant.)
