Mayas not a game engine. Dont even attempt to treat it as such. Game engines usually get far more structured and preprocessed input thetn maya needs to handle. Maya is after all the tool you use to achieve the clean data.
QUOTE(Duckspeaker @ 08/10/09, 08:42 PM) [snapback]312934[/snapback]
I need to look into particle instance (as suggested), but I'm well into another project right now.
Joojaa mentions an MI file---not sure what that is. But his advice is usually top notch.
When you render with mentalray its no longer a maya issue. What maya does is it translates the data into mental images format. Niow mentalimages API has a stream format called MI which describes how the scene looks like (and its descibed in the mental ray reference in mayas manual). Now since the renderer is your target why do the data for maya to see at all. The Mi is there for this reason, it sidesteps translations which your doing 2 times. And its faster since its allready in format that mentalray can read directly.
Not all in maya IS Maya. In corrsponding way if your renderer would have been prman you'd made the data directly into rib, which is the rendermans stream interface.
For obvious reasons this saves maya form doing all the things many times saving you about 1/5 of your memory consumption. (rendering uses a bsp accelerant if you raytrace and for big scenes it does grow quite large)
Both interfaces allow you to write shaders that do the translation on fly. So you coukld also omit wiriting a insertion snippet and just push data there by shader. The bonus with this is thet if your data is very well organized you can make the renderer read data in as needed so not to read parts that it does not see. Called slow read archives. This would sabve data even more if its a issue. This and not using raytracing is how movies could be rendrered way before tehy could have computers with 16 gigs of memory.
