Instances and VRay Proxies: What's best to use, and is there ANY rendertime savings?

[landrvr1]

I'm reading conflicting posts on these issues, and was really curious to see why you would use one over the other, or both at the same time. I've been diving into VRay, am about to undertake my first animation, and am a bit confused as to whether or not I should use either one of these techniques.

 

Lets say I need to show 100 task chairs in a scene. Would the first one be a VRay proxy, then make instances of the rest? What's the benefit of this?

 

Thanks

[Chad Warner]

 

Lets say I need to show 100 task chairs in a scene. Would the first one be a VRay proxy, then make instances of the rest? What's the benefit of this?

 

Thanks

 

Yes.

 

I'm not sure of the rendering time benefit, but it's a huge benefit to the amount of geometry that you can place in the scene. Iv'e created entire forests out of VRay proxied trees that rendered with no problems. There's no way you could do that with regular instances.

[landrvr1]

Yes.

 

I'm not sure of the rendering time benefit, but it's a huge benefit to the amount of geometry that you can place in the scene. Iv'e created entire forests out of VRay proxied trees that rendered with no problems. There's no way you could do that with regular instances.

 

Makes perfect sense, thanks much.

[SunGlare]

I've used the proxies for condo development project. I've modeled houses as a single still renders, so they were huge(I went crazy with tiles). I couldn't fit two buildings in one scene when they asked me for walkthru animation.

 

With VryPrxy - I got 14 huge models in the scene, it is sweet. and they look nice in the closeups.

 

I do copy them as a instance (for same blg type), but I havent noticed difference in render times. I use IrradMap, HDRI+DirectLight.

 

What Ive noticed, when I update VrayProxy file path for a new vrmesh, it dissaperas form the viewport vwindows. It renders though.

After save, close Max, open Max, load they apper again.

[jophus14]

I'm trying to figure out the VrayProxy option, but i'm a tad confused. I just created 9 boxes with different colors and made them a group, I then RIght-clicked and made them a Vray Mesh Export. I selected a file location and a file name and hit ok. I then went to the VrayProxy dropdown and chose my file, but what is supposed to happen next? The boxes are still called Group1 and when I copy them it seems the same as if I were coping a regular group. How can I tell if they have become a Proxy or not? Thanks for your help.

[Chad Warner]

The easiest way to do it is to check the "automatically create proxies" option when you are converting the objects to vraymeshes.