Profiler

The Profiler helps determine what parts of the scene are taking the longest time to render, compare the performance of different material settings and figure out the best settings for your scene. It does that by tracking the time spent in sampling shaders (materials and textures) and volumes during rendering and breaking down the different types of calculations done for each shader, such as GI, Reflections, Refractions, etc. It writes a JSON-formatted report and an HTML report. Both can be read by a browser tracking software, the .json file can also be opened in a text editor offline.

The Profiler report breaks down the tracked time into a few categories: Initialization, GI, Reflection, Refraction, and Others. These categories are only tracked if they were used by the shader. For example, a V-Ray Material with no Refraction enabled does not report anything for Refraction. The same happens if a shader with no Reflection layer is used.

Mode – Determines the mode in which the V-Ray Profiler works.

Off - V-Ray Profiler is disabled.
Process - Reports the time spent on system processes such as compiling geometries, building the Light Cache, exporting the scene from Maya to V-Ray, etc. Suitable for most scenes. It requires resources to run and may slow down your rendering by up to 4%.
Render – Reports the time spent on system processes, as well as rendering processes such as time spent calculating the reflection of a shader, as well as what shaders are reflected in it and how long it took sampling them. This mode is suitable for scenes that include views through a glass window or in a mirror reflection. It can slow down the render by up to 20%.
Full (with Export) - Provides an in-depth report, much like the Render mode, except it also includes information about times for different exports such as geometry and material.

Max Depth – Determines the amount of bounces the rays make after coming into contact with an object. Keep in mind that this option depends on the materials' Reflection and Refraction Max depth parameters. If the GI is set to Brute Force, its Depth parameter influences the value of the V-Ray Profiler's Max depth. This is reflected in the resulting profile.

Output Directory – Specifies the location and name of the output files.

Show Last Profile – Redirects to a browser, where the last profiler report is opened as an .html file.

See the steps to optimize your workflow with V-Ray Profiler. See the video for an example.

1.  Turn on the V-Ray Profiler by setting the Profiler mode to Process or Full.
2. Set the output location of the .json and .html files. If this field is left empty, the generated files are saved in the current project directory.
3. Render your scene. Once you finish the render, you are able to find the .html and .json files in your designated directory. Rendering a second or third time generates more reports. Up to 3 reports can be generated in the same folder. Generating more, without changing the Output Directory, causes the oldest report to be replaced by the new one. Tip: if you forget where you set the output files to be, the location is recorded in the log file.
4. Open the generated report:

 Example result of a Process Mode report in a browser

Example result of a Full Mode report in a browser

Excerpt from a JSON file result read in a text editing software