[simmsimaging]

I guess that makes sense really Unfortunate trade-off in this case as the the slowdown was quite significant. Thanks for figuring it out - it was really driving me crazy.

/b

[Mihnea Balta]

Actually, the small gap isn't the only problem. If you make the gap large, it will render a bit faster, but still slower than when the objects intersect. I think the issue is the diamond mesh itself, which produces some complex light paths that take a long time to compute (like total internal reflection). When the meshes intersect, the complex bounces inside the diamond no longer happen, so less work is needed to solve the image.

[simmsimaging]

That's a catch-22 though, because it doesn't look much like a diamond without that internal light complexity. It just looks like a grey chunk of glass when it intersected.

In any case, it's good to know it's not a glitch. I was pretty sure that I had tested it with the mesh in various intersections etc and it didn't seem to be causing the problem of speed, but I probably just screwed that up. I did for sure still have some weirdness with some files rendering slow on export out of Max, which rendered faster when I simply imported all the elements into a new Studio scene, but perhaps that is something different going on. I'll send a scene if I can reproduce it clearly again.

Thanks /b