Opacity mapping trees, and animation in 1.5; visibility?

[visualride]

Anyone try opacity mapping leaves in Vray 1.5 yet? I'm wondering if the new opacity mapping is working, as well as scan line opacity mapping worked. How is the speed?

Can we animate visiblity without slowing our rendings down to a crawl yet?

[visualride]

Ok, to answer my own questions so far, here are my results for opacity mapping and visibility track animated.

I rendered a simple test of a close up of leaves on a 3d tree that were mapped using a VrayMtl. The tests included both opacity mapped, and not opacity mapped leaves. GI was on, environment default on, IR for first and qmc for second. Low preset for IR. 200x150 res.

20 seconds for no opacity mapping.
3 min. 36 seconds for opacity mapped leaves.

Visibility track animated from 0 to 1 from frame 0 to 10.
At frame 3, with no opacity mapping, 3 min. 38 sec.
At frame 6, Max crashed.

It looks like opacity mapping still needs to be used sparingly, and visiblity track animation is out of the question.

Do we have any options to animating anything, say a house, from visible to invisible, without compositing yet?