Updating Instances ? What is that and how to reduce the amount of time it is spending on that part of rendering ?

[JezUK]

I'm animating a ship and am looking at optimising the scene - one of the areas being how long the render process is taking on something called "Updating Instances".

I don't know what this part of the render process this is, but it is spending a lot of time doing this, and making every object in the scene unique hasn't had much of an effect.....

Can anyone point me in the right direction with regards to this please ?

(I have no problem with the objects in my scene being unique as the modelling side of things etc has finished).

Thanks.

[anthonyh]

Any 2d displacement ,phoenix ocean or a metric ton of scatter objects ?

[glorybound]

For me, it is displacement, which is a killer.

[vlado]

During the "Updating instances phase", V-Ray is basically going through the scene and evaluating all the objects in it (modifiers and stuff). If you have objects that do something at render time, then this phase might take a while. You can look at the vraylog.txt file to see where most of the time is being spent (maybe a particular object).

Displacement would generally be calculated in the "Compiling scene geometry" phase rather than "Updating instances".

Best regards,
Vlado

[JezUK]

Thanks Vlado, I really appreciate that information - I'll take a look at the vraylog file and see what could be causing this - it's taking a minute just to go through that phase for each frame, and I believe it will keep repeating this for every frame of my animation, which'll add up to 15 hours in my case.