Converting figures to Objects to help render time?

Scavenger

I thought i've read something about this..converting figures to objects can be a good thing? (after doing final posing and staging etc..)

Can it help render performance?  3Delight? Iray? Lux?

SixDs

Well, I could be missing something, but turning a character into a static prop does not seem to me to be something that would substantially reduce render times. The poly count would be the same and the textures/materials would be the same, so I'm not certain where the time savings would come from. But again, maybe I'm missing something.

Havos

If your render machine is memory starved, ie the scene file you are rendering is close to say 50% or more of your total memory, then I think that converting to a prop would definitely save you render time, and in cases where your memory use is close to the limit, this could be relatively significant. Converting Genesis characters to props can dramatically reduce their in scene memory footprint, depending on the amount of morphs you have installed, the saving can be hundreds of MB per character.

Of course if you are using a 64 bit machine, plus a 64 bit version of DS, and you have many many GB's of memory, then the conversion is unlikely to help. I also believe that it will not make much difference to getting the scene to fit on a graphics card for an iRay render either. For iRay the mesh and the textures are sent to the card, but not any data being held to record morph information.

Scavenger

Ah..maybe it was memory footprint I read about.

Cris Palomino

If you have decimator, you could use that on some of the secondary things in the scene.

Zantetsukens-cut

surface data is what will account for time taken. the geometry really wont affect render time

the rendering process is mainly the gpu fine tuning the surface data