Vray Instancer not acting like an instancer

[im.thatoneguy]

I have 10 Phoenix PRT_Loader objects and 1 Vray Instancer object which is instancing about 8,000,000 particles total with geometry. It's using 60+ GB of memory to render. That's arguably more than naively loading all of the geometry without any instancing.

[vlado]

Nope, it's not loading all the geometry. However each instance in V-Ray is a relatively large data structure and if you intend for each instance to have a couple of polygons, it will not lead to any memory savings. That's probably something that we can improve. On the positive side, whether you instance a couple of polygons, or a multi-million triangle mesh, the memory usage will be similar.

Best regards,
Vlado

[im.thatoneguy]

Yeah by my calculations my geometry is using 5 bytes per polygon and 6,000 bytes per node.

So unless I'm using 1,000 or more polygons I'm wasting memory. I guess I always assumed that ForestPack was just an efficient native Vray scene graph editor but I guess that means ForestPack is actually packing instance memory far more efficiently than Vray itself.

It would be nice if there was an option on the Vray instancer which just referenced the instancer's node properties and only stored like ReferencedGeometryNode (1 Byte), Transform Matrix (16Bytes) and maybe material (1Byte).