[adri]

Hi

I'm trying to use instances within C4D and have the latest plugin.

I'm attempting to use the grass on a plane method to get something like realistic grass so I need lots and lots of planes! When I hit render it is taking ages to export the scene and generating a very large mxs file. I thought the benefit of instancing was that it only needed to export the geometry once which isn't what it appears to be doing.

Anyone got any suggestions? Is there a better way to do this in C4D?

TIA

Adri

[JDHill]

An instance will only be useful if the data that it duplicates is larger than the instance itself. What that means is, each instance has:

- name
- name of material
- name of reference
- position
- rotation
- scale

Now, if you compare that with a blade of grass (say it's a single tri):

- name
- name of material
- [vertex + normal + tex coord] * 3
- position
- rotation
- scale

You can see, there's not much difference in the size of the data, so you don't gain much of anything. However, if you made a patch of grass blades 100 x 100 as a single mesh (i.e. using hair or whatever), then an instance of it would be somewhere around 1/10000th as heavy as the mesh, and you'd see gains if you exported one patch and along with a bunch of instances of it.

[adri]

Thanks JD. I had more or less come to that conclusion too. It looks like the realistic grass will have to be comped in in PS.

Cheers

Adri