Vray instances vs Max instances

[busseynova]

I don't really understand Vray instances, other than they can speed up rendering in certain cases. Can anyone explain to me whether there's a difference between Vray instances and regular Max instances?

My reason for asking is I have large tower created with Railclone. In order for get per-element shading I had to break out some vertical fins on this tower, and instance them back to each other. There are currently about 30k (regular) instances of these items in the scene and viewport and render performance has dropped noticeably since they were tied up in the RC object. I assume this is because they are no longer leveraging Vray instancing?

Can I convert them to Vray instances of a reference object in the scene, in order to claw back this performance?

[piotrus3333]

do you mean VRayProxy ? these will help with memory management and file size - not speed.

[busseynova]

No, I meant this: https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VMAX/VRayInstancer but maybe I misunderstanding. Is Vray instancer just a fascility to replace particles with render instances? Essentially this is what something like forest pack, railclone or Tyflow does internally right?

[piotrus3333]

yes, more efficient way of replacing particles with geometry.
viewport in max is slowing down significantly with the number of objects. collapsing it into one big geo might work better.

or try mesher compound object in max. if I remember correctly it used to work on RailClone object. will give you one mesh but it could possibly be too slow.

why not just leaving it as RailClone object?

[busseynova]

I was just looking at alternatives, to be honest the Railclone workflow is great, buy I need to convince my superiors to fork out for a full licence. Just using the evaluation version still currently and I have no access to per-element shading which was the reason for breaking out part of the mesh, but the number of instanced cause a big slow down in my scene.

[hermit.crab]

We did some testing here and what you can try doing to speed things up is to instance VRayProxies instead of the actual geometry.