Vray proxies limitations ?

[Erik de Graaf]

Hi,

I have a question regarding proxies.
I have a scene with a lot of roof tiles, so i created a vray proxie for each different roof and copied(instanced and mirrored) them onto the other roofs.
After this my rendertimes went from 6 minutes to 30 minutes, the 6 minutes rendertime includes all the rooftiles as editable mesh in my scene the 30 minute time is with the roof tiles as proxie.

Can anyone clarify ? OR has anyone had the same experience ?

Thanks,

Erik

[vlado]

If you converted a single tile to a proxy, it's going to be slow. It would be more efficient to export the whole roof at once.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Erik de Graaf]

Hi Vlado,

I allready tried that, i also tried to convert all the roofs together as a single proxie but the render remained slow.

Erik

[vlado]

In that case you can try to increase the dynamic memory limit and see if it improves the render times. However, keep in mind that proxies generally add a little bit of overhead on render times - normal geometry will always be faster.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Erik de Graaf]

I am not using dynamic memory, i have it set to static, would changing it to dynamic improve my rendertimes ? As i understood static is the fastest way to render a scene. Dynamic should only be used if you run out of memory wich is not the case, but maybe i didn't understand it correctly.

Erik

[studioDIM]

In my experience dynamic is much quicker with proxies, whereas static is generally quicker with geometry already present in the scene, provided it fits in memory.

I had a couple of occasions where with loads of proxies in the scene, setting the raycaster to static impacted the performance by a huge amount, but that might have been strictly scene dependant...

Lele

[vlado]

I am not using dynamic memory, i have it set to static, would changing it to dynamic improve my rendertimes ? As i understood static is the fastest way to render a scene. Dynamic should only be used if you run out of memory wich is not the case, but maybe i didn't understand it correctly.

Proxies always create dynamic geometry, regardless of the "Default geometry type" setting, similar to displacement and VRayFur. The default geometry option only concerns regular 3dsmax meshes.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Erik de Graaf]

Oke thanks,

i will give it a try, i well let you know if it works.

Erik

[Da_elf]

just curious. did you convert the entire roof to 1 editable mesh or was it all seperate tiles converted to a single proxie object? also with proxies they are not really supposed to speed things up. mainly they are help to be able to render things that normally would crash due to too much polys

[CCS]

Completely different direction... but have you tried rendering out a Z-depth of a section of roof tiles, then simply displaced all the other roofs? That would save a bundle of geometry. Maybe leave the tiles close to the camera modeled, and displace the rest.

Just a different idea.

[mike.edel]

Completely different direction... but have you tried rendering out a Z-depth of a section of roof tiles, then simply displaced all the other roofs? That would save a bundle of geometry. Maybe leave the tiles close to the camera modeled, and displace the rest.

Just a different idea.

alternatively you could try rendering out normal-maps

[Erik de Graaf]

Thanks Guys,

Those are some ideas i can try, but for now the proxies still take a long time to render while the actual geometrie renders fine no matter what settings i change.

@Da Elf: i didn't make one editable mesh for the entire roof, max tends to crash al lot during those operations. I understand that proxies don't speed things up but i am sure they are not supposed to slow things down like this either.

Erik

[mike.edel]

depending on how the proxies work with the availlable memory they could indeed slow down the rendering
especially dynamic allocation/disallocation of memory can be much slower than allocating the memory for the whole scene at once

if your scene renders with the roof as one object, you might be better off doing it this way