RailClone includes native rendering modes for Mental Ray and VRay, making possible to render high-poly objects over splines as long as kilometers.

Usually these techniques push the rendering engine to its limits. In the following notes, we include technical information that can help you to optimize your renderings.

Common Tips

RailClone is able to create complex parametric structures by cloning and adapting mesh objects (called Segments) along a spline. According to the spline's direction, elevation or other parameters, some Segments must be deformed and other simply cloned.

In VRay and Mental Ray it is possible to render thousands of instances of a same object using minimal resources. RailClone uses this feature, identifying what Segments may be cloned, and creating native render instances of them. This process is automatic and transparent to the user, but you can optimize your renderings knowing the following rules:

• If you are certain that a type of Segment should never be deformed (as pillars or joints), turn off 'Bend' in the Segments parameters. Same is applied for 'Slice'.
• You can use meshes or proxies as Segments, but it is not required to convert the high-poly objects to proxies to get a better performance. The plugin converts all objects internally to native render instances, so there are not significative differences (on render time and memory used) between using meshes or proxies.
• Proxies cannot be deformed, so RailClone always creates instances from them. This is the reason that 'Bend' and 'Slice' parameters are disabled if you assign a proxy on the Segments list.

Some features are not available when using the native render mode:

• Vertex welding (VRay and Mental Ray)
• Randomness->Material ID and Mapping in Mental Ray.
• RailClone objects cannot have any modifier applied.

You can switch to the standard render mode turning off the "Display->VRay/Mental Ray shader" checkbox. In this way the plugin creates a single mesh containing all the geometry.

VRay

RailClone offers some unique features using this render engine:

• Improved performance and reduced memory footprint for very large objects, generating the geometry dynamically inside the camera frustrum.
• We have included a debug mode, to identify visually from the render what pieces are instanced:
  • Set General->Seed value to 9999
  • Apply to the RailClone object a Multi-sub material, that includes a material with ID = 100
  • The instances will be rendered using the Material ID 100.