Does VRay recognise proxies in separate files?

[Macker]

Hi all,

I'm currently in the process of trying to optimise some files to reduce ram usage, and it's going pretty well however I have a question regarding proxies and VRay.

I currently have a max model that references different interiors, but some of these interiors share the same proxy objects. Obviously due to these being in separate files they cannot be instances, but my question in such a scenario is; does vray recognise them as being the same mesh (proxy) and only load them into memory once?

Many thanks,
Chris

[^Lele^]

So, you have proxy files of the same mesh, but they have different filenames on disk?

[Macker]

Basically this. Will the master file that I'm rendering from recognise (in vray) that the base file is identical in both and load the geometry once?

[^Lele^]

Ah, sure.
Yes, that should be loaded only once.

[Macker]

Awesome!

[^Lele^]

Accordingly, now that you made me think of it, the vrayBitmap will do the same to texture files, loaders instanced or not.

[Macker]

Accordingly, now that you made me think of it, the vrayBitmap will do the same to texture files, loaders instanced or not.

I had literally just logged on this morning to ask you exactly this haha.

Is there a (reliable) bitmap to vraybitmap converter?

[^Lele^]

We ship one with v-ray, it's in the right mouse menu.

[Macker]

Absolutely brilliant. Thanks so much.

I've never had to/time to optimise a scene this much, so I've never had to consider these things. They say necessity is the mother of invention...

[^Lele^]

Hey, to each their own!
I'm all too happy to try things out for you busy artists!

p.s.: you could do worse in terms of optimising your scene than to ask the converter to convert the textures to .tx.

[Macker]

So, after converting all the bitmaps to vraybitmap, memory usage has increased quite a lot! Any ideas why that might be?

I haven't converted to .tx yet.

[^Lele^]

It ought to be *markedly* the opposite.
I'm aware of the gravity of the question i'm about to ask, but would you mind sharing (privately, under NDA, ofc.) the scene with max bitmap loaders?

[Macker]

You know what, the only other change I made was to include motion blur (which could potentially have caused it), however now that I've run more tests the memory usage seems to be normal (actually 10gb(!!!) lower than it was using max bitmap loaders). I'm not sure what caused the memory spikes I was seeing previously.

Will keep you posted to see if it happens again.

[^Lele^]

Motion blur with a lot of triangles in the scene, and/or many substeps will definitely increase memory a lot.
Ever so glad to hear you're saving all that RAM just by switching: a lot of work was put into the loaders by the devs, they'll be just as chuffed, i reckon. ^^