Proxies

- One of the most frustrating moments on…any rendering project comes when after many minutes,…maybe even hours, worth of intensive CPU calculation,…the application we're working in suddenly crashes…with an out-of-memory error.…And, of course, as projects in all aspects of…the 3D industry grow larger with more and more…data being loaded into scenes,…the potential for this painful scenario to be encountered…on a very regular basis continues to grow.…Any tools then put at our disposal by software developers…to help combat this problem…are going to be most welcome indeed.…

One such, being the introduction to pretty much…all modern render engines, of the proxy object.…A proxy in mental ray terms is a visually simplified…piece of geometry that sits in the scene…as a standing for a much more complex,…sometimes even extremely complex object that,…in and of itself, would be difficult to make use of…in a render due to the strain it would place…on system resources.…This strain can occur because, by default,…raytrace render engines such as mental ray,…