recommended way to use standin

[noi.meta]

Hi,

I'm just wondering if there's any recommended way to use standin.

Currently, we're using a huge number of standins in our scene. Most of them are instances. And we are struggling with the render initialization time (>90% of render time on scene creation). It seems all standins are created every time even they are out of the camera frustum.

Is there a way to optimize this?

We tried switching standin back to geometries, and it seems the render time got a bit better, but the scene itself is too heavy to work in Maya.

[lee_griggs]

Have you tried frustrum_culling?

[noi.meta]

just tried after seeing your comment, unfortunately, it didn't help.

[schwungsau]

which standin's there would be almost no scene generation time. the whole point of it. a standin can load directly by Arnold during rendertime. no converting needed, something must must be wrong with setup.

[noi.meta]

We export geometries, shaders, etc. from Maya as .ass, then import them back to Maya as aiStandin.

At render time, it seems mtoa spend most of the time exporting DAG node of type aiStandin and creating arnold nodes.