VRayProxy vs XREF - When use one or the other? Huge building with catch

[Morne]

Hi all

So both VRayProxy and XREF does the same in the sense that it keeps the file size down of your main working file. Problem with VRayProxy is once it's a proxy, you can't chance it.

Any reason to use the one over the other?

I have a situation whereby I made a very detailed group or an element of 1 section of a exterior cladding detail ( glazing, frame, grill, loover, fin) which gets slap onto a building. This element goes round the building obviously (about 200 copies per floor). Then there are about 15 floors. Now the fun starts: I need to cut out a curved section on the side of the building going down (sort of in the shape of that famous dubai building). So most of my instanced cladding will stay the same except where I need to cut this "sail" right down both sides of the building.

How would you go about doing this taking into consideration memory and rendering performance issues? (Also that building is the smallest, there are other larger buildings)

[tricky]

Anything we can look at to help make suggestions?
Do you NEED all that detail in there? Do you get that close?

[Morne]

In my opinion the final thing won't need that detail as you'll probably see all the builings at the same time from an arial shot. But you know bosses, this building is being developed 1st and they want to see all that detail. Sorry I can't show anything, but it is kinda almost like the building used in the marketing material when max design was launched. Except on the side it has a 3m or 4m band cut out in a curve running down the building. In this band the glazing and other stuff steps back.

[YoyoBoy]

For the first time, I've recently been doing stuff with tons of trees painted about a landscape. Because I love all things VRay, I converted all the trees models I'm using to VRay Proxies before distributing them. They rendered so slow that the scene was basically unrenderable, even at tiny test resolution. I kept starting from scratch and kept getting the same result.

Then I decided to use Max X-Refs instead, and everything now renders perfectly fine. Does anyone else have this experience? Is there some place where I probably didn't do something right?