Cloning and Reference Object best practices?

[Streetwise]

I have a project where I'm rendering about 6 instances of the same desk object, grouped together in a configuration. There are about 5 of these groups in the scene. Looking for better efficiencies, is it true that cloning the original to reference objects will help with the render process? Right now, it seems to take a long time for the "loading bitmaps" phase to occur, but the actual render process seems to be pretty normal for the size. What are some tricks of the trade when rendering a large amount of identical clones?

Thanks.

[theedge]

You mean : a render speed benefit when using Reference clones vs Instance clones ? Never heard of that.
The only difference to me is the fact that you can add individual unique modifiers to reference clones but not to instance clones.

[Streetwise]

Maybe I'm getting confused then with using proxies, or something. Yes, I had thought that by using references, it would speed up the render process as there were fewer things to compute. Don't know where I got that from. Thanks for confirming.

[Joelaff]

VRay Proxies would be great for this. They would load the geometry only once, and only the portion seen in the frame (or reflections/GI).

Instances and References still take up memory in the scene at render. They are converted to meshes at render time. They do take up less memory when working in Max, though. Multiple VrayProxy objects in your scene that reference the same .vrmesh file will act as instances and only load that mesh once. The InstancesToVRayProxy.ms script off Script Spot can convert existing instances to a single vrmesh that is referenced by all of them (keeping them in place in the scene).

To speed up loading bitmaps first always use VRayHDRI nodes rather than bitmap nodes. They only load the maps needed for the current frame. Second, consider tiled textures (.tx files for int formats, tiled .exrs for floating point). When you use tiled texture with VRayHDRI (not with the built in bitmap node) then only the tiles seen at render time (or Reflection/gi) are loaded. See the man page for VRayHDRI.