Rendertime rise to silly levels when 1 extra object enters the frame

[HenrikBC]

Using max 2010 sp1 + vray 1.5 sp4.
Workstation is a 2009 Mac Pro 2x4core - 6gb ram. Windows7 Pro x64.

I'm have a fairly simple - yet geometry heavy - scene here. No GI, no reflections in this render pass, just a a few vray proxy objects with dense poly counts.







I have 1 vray dome light, 1 directional light using vray shadows - and then a few directional lights using shadow maps. When that rock on the left enters the frame it adds half an hour to the render time. I have no GI, no reflections, the lighting should be the same in terms of shadows when the left object is offscreen (apart from the surface shading/shadowing of that one object ofcourse). What am I not seeing here?

[percydaman]

whats your memory limit set to in the settings tab?

[HenrikBC]

Hah! I hoped it was something stupid. It was set to default - 400. Setting it to 1200 shaved it down to 01:42 instead of 33:03. Thanks a bunch!

[percydaman]

Glad I could help. And glad it was indeed something stupid.

[HenrikBC]

Yes - I love user errors because they're usually easier to solve once pointed in the right direction.

Here's another problem I now have, which may be less stupid on my part:



This is a render straight out of max with my low res rocky objects which I want to use for the reflections in the water only.

I wish to render out the water as a seperate pass, for a variety of reasons - speed being one of them, but I wish to have the reflections from the rocky objects visible in the water. The problem is getting the fog applied to the rocks so they reflect properly in the water toward the horizon. When fog is applied and the rocks set to "Not visible to camera" they will still be in my render as ghostly object with a vague alpha on top of everything else.

[vlado]

What kind of fog are you using? If it is the 3ds Max fog, then it must be in exponential mode for transparency (and invisibility) to work properly. VRayEnvironmentFog should work correctly right away.

Best regards,
Vlado

[HenrikBC]

3ds max standard fog - and it is set to exponential but does not produce the wanted result - the foggy objects appear as semi transparent both on top of the water surface and in the horizon. It's funny because I could swear that I had it up and running a while back, but now I can't get it working if my life depended on it.

Hmm.. I've just made a test scene and tried using scanline this time. And now it works. Then when I change the renderer to vray - it produces the wrong result again:
http://vray.helvede.net/fog_test.max