Rendering with MR proxies increases render times?

[Cad64]

Ok, I'm a bit confused now. I thought Mental Ray proxies were supposed to help speed up render times, not drag them down? We're in the process of upgrading from Max 9 to Max 2010. One of the main reasons for this upgrade is because of everything I've read about how great proxies are and how they help speed up render time.

 

I'm using the Max 2010 trial version right now, and I've put together a simple scene filled with Xfrog trees. 18 trees to be exact. I set up my camera, environment, render settings, etc. and rendered the scene in 13 minutes, 24 seconds.

 

Then I created a copy of this file and replaced the trees with MR proxies. I inserted one proxy and then instanced it to each tree location and then deleted the trees. Everything else is the same as the previous scene. Obviously the scene is much lighter and much easier to work with now, but my render time increased to 15 minutes, 29 seconds.

 

What gives? Why does it take longer to render with proxies? Is there some setting I'm not aware of? Am I doing something wrong? Or is this rumor about speed increase just a big lie to get you to upgrade? If so, I'm in big trouble, because I've been really pushing for this upgrade, and my biggest selling point was the advantage of proxies.

 

BTW, I used BSP with the scanline algorithm enabled for the above time.

When I switch to BSP2 & disabled scanline, the render time goes to 15 min. 31 sec.

 

I hope someone has some words of wisdom for me, otherwise I'm gonna get my butt kicked tomorrow when I present these render times.

[Cad64]

Once again, I've answered my own question.

 

I found a script HERE which I used to create proxies of all the trees in my original file. It works great as far as converting all instances of the trees to proxies and deleting the original geometry all in one swift motion. It also helped tremendously with my render time. It's now down to 13 minutes 20 seconds. 4 seconds faster than the original file. I must have done something wrong in the original proxy file?

 

Oh well, I'm back on track.