The poor man's VFX sequence

[rmejia]

That looked awesome, guess it could be auto pilot or remote controlled anyways

[Mikokariadis]

That was impressive to watch. One thing I didn't understand in your description was "I had the calculate all the tiny lights in a separate pass as they were quadrupling my render time".

Was this with a set of lights and the geometry then another set of lights and same geometry then blend of both passes?

[BBB3]

Hi there.
I was referring to the blue lights stuck on several of the buildings. They are separate meshes with VrayLightMtl. When rendering these together with the main scene, the render time rose astronomically. So I rendered the beauty pass without the lights, then rendered the lights with a pitch-black diffuse material overriding all other materials in the scene (and no background). This pass (lightning fast) was then composited back over the main pass using a screen blending mode. I don't get any illumination that way of course, but it was neither important nore really visible.
I'm still learning Vray so I'm not sure I know why this is happening. I thought it wouldn't be a problem to have so many light sources since I'm not using GI here, but I was wrong apparently.

[Mikokariadis]

Thank you for clearing that one up BBB3. Didn't know how dramatic that would be in render time increase, never used VrayLightMtl for it. Good tip, may save me a lot of time in the future. Again, great work.