Which one Vray handles better ?

[muzzy]

We have scenes with thousands of simple plane shrubs and flowers. I normally instances those planes and keep it like that. I don't consider to
proxy, because they are only 4-8 faces each and as object in scene easier to handle.

Is it better to keep objects as instances or collapse 1000 objects to one object based on material.

Which one Vray handles better ?

[mike.edel]

depends on the rest of your scene
if you are only rendering 4-8 faces per object * 1000 instances you probably don't need the instances (they also have an overhead)

so one joined object should be faster
i guess you won't notice the difference though, because you will not use enough resources (esp. memory) to really need instances

now if those were trees with 5k polys each instances (or even proxies) should be faster

[muzzy]

thanks mike.edel

Forgot to mention, scenes are loaded architectural scenes, buildings, roads, etc. mostly our low poly shrubs and flowers are instanced

Overall scene is 2 million poly + proxy trees.

I want to learn theoritically, which one vray handles better.

I hope someone from Chaos answers this,

Thanks

[mike.edel]

if the rest of your scene is already saturating the ram (i.e. close to max usage) then proxies/instances should indeed lower the overall ram usage, leading to faster rendering times

[CXStudios]

Are you saying your 'plane shrubs' are planes using materials with Opacity maps on them? If so, it would render MUCH faster if you created an object based on the spline of the alpha and mapped the same material without the opacity map. Alpha channels take for ever!