Deforming Meshes - How to reduce pre-render calculations?

[mitchgates]

Hi all. I have a scene with several deforming 200k+ poly object that is over 2500 frames long. A good chunk of my render time each frame is in the pre-calculation of compiling geometry and updating instances, etc. I'm looking for ways to shave off these times and wondering if using Alembic or animated VRay proxies would be a better approach. Thoughts?

[dgruwier]

Yes, you can bake the animation range as an alembic file sequence and load it with the VRay Proxy object. You also can convert the alembic files to vrmeshes for an extra speed boost, but just doing the deformation beforehand so all VRay needs to do is load the mesh from the disk should help a lot.