[jfrancis]

I'm just finally getting seriously into Maxwell after a while away, so sorry if this is obvious or old ...

If I have a lot of heavy geometry, can I (and should I) make the simple proxies invisible to camera and visible to all subsequent light and shadow interaction, while the heavy 'hero' geometry is for primary sight only?

Will that gain me anything?

Or am I better off doing multiple renders with mixed heavy and light forms and swapping them around and splitting all the hero parts of each render together into one mastr image in Photoshop?

[jfrancis]

...well, I was glad to see that the Maxwell Maya plugin respects the 'display layers' in Maya. Now, I guess I can have a heavy and light version of things and toggle them on and off for various renders...

[Bubbaloo]

So, your talking about low poly and high poly objects, and being able to interchange them as you need them? Personally, I usually save out a different scene for each shot and delete/replace what I don't need.