I am working on an interior scene with 100’s of theater seats. When the seats are turned off the scene renders quickly, but when I turn the seats back on it increases the render and calc times from minutes to hours. What is the best way to handle this. It is a dark scene and all the seats are the same. Would proxies be better? Would removing the chairs from part of the calc help?
ohh your scene cries definetly for proxies.
not that it would render much faster but i will be a good prevention for memory-issues. i use proxies all the time esp. for 3D plants and furniture.
regards
ale
Proxies
Doesn’t proxies actually render slower?
How many seats and what is the polycount of each seat?
I have done 1,800 seat theatres and they do take a while to render at a final high rez.
I haven’t used proxies for theatre seats. The designers I work with freak out if they just see the wire proxies in the viewport. So I just use instanced objects.
I haven’t really tested but 1.50.00 will automatically treat large numbers of instances sort of like proxies but stored in RAM. Should be a little quicker than proxies and better with ram usage than in older versions.
Using proxies will be slower.. but how much depends on how you set it up.
Should only be a small impact say around 10-15%
But you must just make in seat or seat of seats a proxy then instance that around the scene.
Dont select all the chairs and make then one big proxy that really will slow things down alot.
Chairs
I have one chair that is instanced 284 more times. I rendered the scene without the chairs in about 2 hrs and with the chairs, 16hrs later, still processing. They are not very complicated chairs. When it is done I’ll post my settings to see if I could tweak something to prevent this excessive render time from happening again.
Maybe its a material problem and not a geometry problem.
convert your chair material to a plain mid gray vray material and rerender to see if changes dramatically in render time.
Good luck!
Onz
Chairs
I will try that once it is done. I waited to long now. Here is a screenshot of the scene.
Large render time
Something isn’t right in render land. I was expecting a 1 or so hour estimated render time, but not this:
render time
Another thing about this scene is they are all IES lights. Are we recommending the use of them? Could this be the cause of my bloated render times?
ies light sure dont help thats for sure.
IES
They just are a lot easier to setup since you are not guessing. Good new though, that est rendering time was way high. 2hrs ago it was 16hrs and not it is 7hr.
Bobby,
In a scene like this, I would recommend you replace the IES with standard Max spotlights. Then adjust the emitting ‘cone’ of the light and the location of the far attenuation so the lights just don’t go on forever (as happens with inverse decay falloff). That will help render time dramatically. Personally, I’d also turn off the area shadows on them as well since, for me, it wouldn’t be worth the additional render time.
Just some ideas. Sometimes we have to sacrifice being correct for getting it done 
IES
I have a lobby of the same project that I will take you advice on, thanks.