Does adding more bones decrease render times?
OK, Armando discovered a really cool tip that can dramatically speedup some renderings with V5. If you have an object (or character) that has some raytracing (transparency, or raytraced shadows on it, or reflections) you can speed it up by putting bones in it. What happens is that it has to search through the geometry for every ray, which we do with a BSP tree. This is bone based, so if you have a high patch count model, and divide up the geometry among bones, it doesn’t have to search as far. The reason we didn’t encounter this much before was in V4 the geometry was already divided into segments. And most people making high patch count models in V5 are already using bones. Remember this is only an issue if you invoke the raytracer and have a lot of patches and few bones. -Ken Baer. Director Mac Product Development, Hash Inc.
