On-demand geometry loading from disk files

[visualride]

I saw 'On-demand geometry loading from disk files' as a feature for VRay in its feature list.
I have an outdoor scene that is already too large to support putting in too many trees in one render pass. Will VRay allow me to have these trees placed in separate files, and merge them in (and delete the out of frame trees) at pre-determined frames during a rendering? This would be Very cool.

[Dynedain]

No, it will simply load the geometry as needed through a special proxy object type called Vray Proxy. You export your objects to Vray Proxy format, and then only a refference to that object exists in your scene. Vray will pull in the full object for rendering.

The object needs to be a normal object within max, IE, it can be converted to an editable mesh. Objects that require special plugins to simply exist (like RPC or SpeedTree) can't be turned into Vray Proxies.

[visualride]

Thanks for your fast reply Dynedain. The proxy sollution seems like it will work for me.
I've been considering buying SpeedTree instead of XFrog.
Aren't speed trees just low poly trees with a lot of opacity mapped poly's for the leaves? I guess that I need to find out if the SpeedTrees can exist without the plugin as poly objects.

[Dynedain]

I use SpeedTree, they can't. The plugin is required in order to have the objects exist in the scene; they can't be converted to polys or meshes.

SpeedTree doesn't work great with Vray. It is a low poly object, and uses opacity mapped fronds for the leaves and small branches. Unfortuneately, Vray has some slowness issues when using opacity maps. This, combined with how SpeedTree likes to generate a lot of coplanar faces (trapping light rays and causing problems) can make scenes take a long time to render. Oh, and it uses some wierd non-standard smoothing so it doesn't look so polygonal, but Vray doesn't supppot it.

Simply put, if you want to do some kind of big forrest scene, I wouldn't use speedtree + vray. SpeedTree has too many problems. Simply adding one or two trees to what was already a heavy complex scene can almost double your rendertimes.

[visualride]

It looks like I'm not going to get around a lot of compositing work. I'm just afraid of all the the little things that can be missed rendering everything separately.
How do you deal with reflections of trees in windows for compositing?
I imagine that placing gobo shadow casting lights for the tree shadows will take care of that.
I'll probably need to limit my animations to parallel movement along my avenues to do away with multiple mattes of my houses covering up the trees. Do you have any recommendations for a tree program? I'm writing out my proposal today at my company for software.
I'm definately getting VRay.

[Dynedain]

There was a thread in the general forum that was comparing some of the different tree programs. Onyx and XFrog seemed to get decent remarks, but apparently all tree programs have their quirks and problems.