Basic instancing question

[patrickAYJKH]

I'm relatively new to Arnold, and have a maya instancing question. I looked around, but all I can find is information on stand-ins. My question is do you have to use stand-ins to take advantage of instancing in Arnold/? I have a scene, with repeating rafters. The rafters all share the same shape node as they were instanced in maya. It looks like this:

all of the m_Rafter GEO pieces share the Rafter_MDL shape node. I'm suspicious because cryptomatte objects are working, and I know with standins they don't unless you go through and use the mtoa attribute that gives them a unique object index. Note: I was going to try and use the logs, but I couldn't get the log to output interactively to check instancing (does it show what it instanced?) Thanks for the help,

Patrick

[Stephen.Blair]

Maya instances are exported as instances (aka Arnold ginstance nodes)

You don't need to use standins (aka Arnold procedural nodes) to have instances.

00:00:00  1826MB         | there are 0 lights and 9 objects:
00:00:00  1826MB         |       1 persp_camera
00:00:00  1826MB         |       2 utility
00:00:00  1826MB         |       1 driver_exr
00:00:00  1826MB         |       2 gaussian_filter
00:00:00  1826MB         |       1 closest_filter
00:00:00  1826MB         |       3 polymesh
00:00:00  1826MB         |       5 ginstance
00:00:00  1826MB         |       1 list_aggregate
00:00:00  1826MB         |       1 set_parameter
00:00:00  1826MB         |       1 color_manager_syncolor
00:00:00  1826MB         |       1 renderview_display
00:00:00  1826MB         |       1 driver_arv

[patrickAYJKH]

Thanks Stephen for the confirmation. I was concerned mostly because the cryptomatte objects work with maya instances, when they don't with standins (unless something changed).