proxy theory question

[sharktacos]

I've been doing some tests comparing the render times of complex meshes vs. vray proxies of the these meshes.
I was expecting to see the proxies render much faster, but the render times seem to be pretty much the same.
Am I missing something here? Shouldn't a proxy render faster? Otherwise, why bother?

[kimgar]

proxies are used to limit memory consumption, not necessarily render times. i tried the vrayproxies to speed up viewport performance yesterday, but that actually stopped the render altogether.

[vlado]

Shouldn't a proxy render faster?

Nope, they shouldn't Regular meshes are always faster.

Otherwise, why bother?

They take less memory and allow you to render lots of geometry. They also make your 3ds Max scene smaller, by not storing the full geometry information in it, but loading it only at render time.

Best regards,
Vlado

[vlado]

i tried the vrayproxies to speed up viewport performance yesterday, but that actually stopped the render altogether.

Yes, viewport performance can be optimized a lot and something we still have to work on.

Best regards,
Vlado

[kimgar]

actually, viewport performance is excellent, render performance is not. it would be great if the 'import as mesh' option could happen at rendertime. so that you would see the proxy in viewport, but render a regular mesh.

i'm really struggling with max's handling of large files and thousands of objects. attaching to one big object works, but messes up all smoothing groups. i've used xrefs and containers, but vrayproxies seems like the best option (if it could render as a regular mesh)

[csmallfield]

Isn't it faster than geometry for rendering when you are using the proxy for a lot of objects? Like the same 5 trees as proxies 300 times. Since it only loads the proxy once?

While on the topic of proxies, at one point I thought that shaders were embedded in the proxies, like in Vray 1.5 but now it seems as if you can't have them embedded at all. Am I right about this? If so, are people just using scripts to apply shaders when importing a lot of different objects with a bunch of different shaders per proxy? Or am I going about this all wrong?

-Chris

[evanerichards]

I just finished a project with 39,000 proxy objects. I can confirm that the textures are NOT embedded (I'm on Vray 2.2) You have to take textures you already have made and link them to your proxy object. The proxy object does not render faster (I can only assume it would possibly render slower since the computer has to load the geometry from a separate file). It does help though, as others have said, with the speed of the viewport. When I turned on 39,000 proxy objects in my scene it started to get very sluggish. If those 39,000 objects had been actual full res geometries??? I shudder to think!

[vlado]

actually, viewport performance is excellent, render performance is not. it would be great if the 'import as mesh' option could happen at rendertime. so that you would see the proxy in viewport, but render a regular mesh.

I would rather work on improving the performance of the proxies themselves Their main design goal is still to reduce RAM consumption, so we must stick to that.

Best regards,
Vlado

[sharktacos]

Thanks for the replies.

Something I also noticed is that objects would render differently. I have not had time to fully investigate what is going on but it seemed that the proxy was doing a better job with trace depth, so on the regular mesh I was seeing reflection in the shadowed/occluded areas, but in the proxy it would be dark there as I would expect.

Is there an explanation for that, and is there a way to get this behavior without using proxies?

[ivaylo.ivanov]

The material is not embedded in the vrmesh file. You must cerate the proxy in Maya itself using the "Create V-Ray Proxy" menu and check "Automatically create proxies" in the dialog. In this way V-Ray will a automatically recreate the shading for you.

[sharktacos]

Thanks for the replies.

Something I also noticed is that objects would render differently. I have not had time to fully investigate what is going on but it seemed that the proxy was doing a better job with trace depth, so on the regular mesh I was seeing reflection in the shadowed/occluded areas, but in the proxy it would be dark there as I would expect.

Is there an explanation for that, and is there a way to get this behavior without using proxies?

I figured out what was going on with this. The original mesh has problems with the normals that were causing the reflections to act oddly. Unlocking the normals fixed it on the mesh. The proxy seemed to be handling it more intelligently, and so was not having this problem, hence the discrepency.