I have modelled a flatted development of about 200 flats. The window and door frames are similar throughout the development so, they have been copied numerous times. The frames on their own, amount to 104,188 faces which is acceptable but, they increase the rendering time by four times.
The material is a simple vray mat with no reflection, bitmaps etc..
Does anyone have a solution for speeding up the rendering ? Or why does it happen in the first place?
Yes. Also, how much other geometry do you have in the scene? You can try to play with the raycaster parameters a bit (e.g. set the max. level to 100 and the face/level coefficient to 1.0).
That is incredible ! It actually renders quicker with the frames entire geometry in the main scene. Before I had to bring in the frames as a proxy so that I could pan around the scene !
Things will always render slower when using Proxys.
The advantage of proxys is they take less memory to render, but the side effect is they render slower.
If you had been using them as proxys the whole time, that might have been worth mentioning in the first post