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when dealing with 1000's of instances out of 3dsmax they seem to take much longer to render in v2 than 1.7 (literally hours instead of minutes) - is anyone else experiencing this? quite possible I've missed a new setting of course...

Julian

Are you sure the instances are actually being exported as instances? Check the Maxwell console, it should say "Num Meshes: 1" or some other low number close to the top of the log if instancing is being used. If instancing isn't used, it will say that there are as many meshes as objects in the scene (thousands, in your case).

thanks Mihnea, yes definitely - just 1 mesh in the log and the instances show up in studio.

Turns out it is faster to go the memory hogging route (use instancing=off) as it gets on with rendering much quicker once the file is loaded.

Mihai commented in another thread that in some cases speed increases could be achieved however in others it could result in speed loses!

My understanding of that is instances still don't work!

Julian, if you can please send me a link to that scene, you can PM me the link. The file will remain private.

OK Mihai thanks - i will setup a link - although its easy enough to set up a simulation (100x100 teapots - physical sky). This is what I did to ensure I wasn't having any MW1.7 to MW2 conversion issues with my real scene - i get the same slow result, starts up almost instantly in 1.7.

Send me the generated mxs file from the plugin. You can upload it to rapidshare etc....

done

Rendering with instances turned off will always be faster than with instances on. Only use instances if you are running out of RAM.

Bub,

From my experience that isn't the case. Since the rendering engine only has to collect information from the object once it's also a lot faster. That hasn't been true in Maxwell it seems but I think that's the exception to the rule.

-Brodie

Hi Brian and Brodie - I am experiencing something different to normal instancing on and off subtleties (given that the scene is within RAM limits and discounting the difference in loading time of course) - this is a really slow grind, ie nothing on the screen yet with v2 while 1.7 has practically finished. Hopefully Mihai will get the same result, we will see. I am surprised no-one else has had the same experience, maybe its my system.

Maybe keeping 1.7 and 2 installed together has something to do with this - although it appears they are quite separate installations.

Yes I've checked this scene and it's running slower, it's not normal. I've sent it to the developers for debugging, it should run at least as fast as 1.7.

Thanks a lot for your scene Julian, we are debugging it right now. We'll keep you updated.

brodie_geers wrote: From my experience that isn't the case. Since the rendering engine only has to collect information from the object once it's also a lot faster.

Hi Brodie, you are right in the fact that with instances you just need to load the mesh once, and it has benefits, not only in the memory area but also the loading time is faster. However during render time instances are usually slower than real meshes, there are many reasons that cause this. One of them is that when you calculate intersections with instances you have to get access to the real mesh and calculate transformations that are skipped when you are rendering the main object. There are other reasons related to the way rays use navigation structures (voxelizations, bsp's etc) that are more complex to expose here. Therefore usually instances just save memory but not speed (there is an exception if the memory consumption using real objects instead instances was too high that the system run out of real memory and has to use virtual instead, the performance could dramatically drop down in that case)

I hope we can give you good news soon, thanks again for reporting this issue.

Regards,

Juan

Juan thanks for some better insight on the instances issue!

I know maxwell's engine would be a complex beast, hence just why there are no real substitutes. That said the likes of Indigo have had amazing success with instances for some years now. I know when first introduced there one SU user produced a short video rendered unbiased with 1000's of tree instances - something that couldn't be considered as even a still in Maxwell!

I guess the non techno have to ask why this feature doesn't achieve the same with maxwell?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkMOjYx4 ... annel_page
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAxdSfJ8 ... annel_page

Juan, yowza! That's quite interesting information! At least for me then, that makes instancing nigh worthless. I've run my hospital exterior renders up to 5000 pixels wide and have yet to run out my 8 gigs of ram. It seems to me that no matter what, much more time will be spent rendering that loading so it's better to sacrifice the up front time.

So you're saying that if I were going to render a forest, say, I'd be better off rendering it without instances so long as my machine could take it?

-Brodie