Philosophy - in scene vs. VRayProxy vs. XRef?

[jpl1040]

I've been working on scenes that are pretty full, including cars, people w/ bipeds, trees, and buildings.

I've heard that VRay Proxy is a good way to optimize memory usage but is otherwise not necessary.

Large scenes slow every load/save/autoback etc. so it seems wise to XRef some parts in a complex scene.

My question to the forum is - what is your general philosophy of when to put something out to VRayProxy or XRef and when to keep it in scene? And what is your reasoning?

thanks for your input -

Jim

[dimo]

Hi,

VRayproxies are a great way of reducing memory overhead. However there are some limitations you should be aware of:

- You can't animate the mesh any more. (Characters, Bending trees etc.)
- They don't generate shadow maps
- They don't generate correct Motionblur if they are animated
- They don't store Vertexnormals

So VRayproxies are good for environment stuff with heavy polycount like trees etc. All your lighters should be aware that they can't use shadow map shadows any more.

Best Regards,

Dieter

[joconnell]

Vray proxies are a rendering benefit as they can be loaded and unloaded from memory during a frame so they'll allow you to render files that are too memory intensive due to haveing too many polygons (eg forests full of polyong trees)

Xrefs are more of a workflow thing where you get to link files together so on a large project where different people are working on different assets (lets say different buildings in a housing scheme) you can make a soft reference to another persons scene file, see it in your viewport and if that person keeps using the same file name when they save, you'll always have the latest version of the file in your scene. From a rendering point of view though they offer no benefit as they still need to be fully loaded into memory before the scene file can be rendered.