I have to render a very simple scene with some matte objects, GI turned off, and just outputting alphas. To get a decently crisp alpha takes less than 30s, but the ‘updating instances’ stage seems to take as much time again, and happens for every frame that is rendered.
Is there a way of ‘updating instances’ just once at the start of rendering the sequences? Over 1900 frames that difference is really going to add up. This is on Max 2019 and Vray 3.6
All the above is valid: that’s an unavoidable stage.
You could possibly make it quicker by lowering the number of nodes in your scene (i assume you have many?), maybe by merging non-moving geometry.