Updating instances taking a very long time

[tiw]

I have a scene with 30,000 objects in that are animating. Everything was going well until I animated the visibility of the objects. If I have object properties set "By Object" as opposed to "By Layer" updating instances takes an insane amount of time. "By Layer" starts rendering almost instantly. I would like to be able to individually animate each objects visibility though.

Has anyone else encountered this? Are there any fixes other than setting the object to "By Layer"

[AJ Jefferies]

I've never had a good time animating the visibility track for objects. That said, the problem I usually encounter is the 'fake' transparency giving V-Ray's calculations a massive headache and I've not heard of 'by layer' being faster than 'by object' so I don't know if this is the same issue. Have you tried it on a simple scene to see if the results can be replicated?

The only solution I can offer is to use compositing to fade the objects (i.e animate a mask to control the opacity) but as you're dealing with 30'000 objects that might not be possible.

[cheerioboy]

Are you using the visibility to fade the object or just make it instantly disappear? I've always keyed the objects and have them move under the scene instead of animating their visibility because of the wonkiness vray has with calculating visibility and opacity in general.

I worked on a past project of a stadium full of people that needed to fill the stadium in a stop motion type of effect. A co-worker had spent all this time animating the visibility of the people which caused a huge headache. In the end we grabbed clusters of people and keyed them to drop down out of the scene to build up this effect which worked much more effectively.

[tiw]

Thanks for the replies!

I am just making stuff appear instantly so animating them moving from far off is a great solution!

[vlado]

That said, the problem I usually encounter is the 'fake' transparency giving V-Ray's calculations a massive headache and I've not heard of 'by layer' being faster than 'by object' so I don't know if this is the same issue.

This only concerns objects with partial visibility. If they are either fully visible or invisible, there are no problem.

With that said, the slow instances thing when "By Object" is selected might be more related to 3ds Max - maybe it has to do extra work to find out if an object is visible or not when V-Ray asks compared to when this is done by layer. In any case it would be good if we can get a scene for this to see if there is something that we can do about it.

Best regards,
Vlado

[tiw]

OK, unfortunately I cannot share the specific file but I will put together an example file. How should I send it you?

[vlado]

OK, unfortunately I cannot share the specific file but I will put together an example file. How should I send it you?

You can send it to vray@chaosgroup.com

Best regards,
Vlado

[AJ Jefferies]

This only concerns objects with partial visibility. If they are either fully visible or invisible, there are no problem.

Sorry Vlado, I should have mentioned that. I also completely understand why it does this, so it's not a problem for me