Maxwell Render

I guess that makes sense really Unfortunate trade-off in this case as the the slowdown was quite significant. Thanks for figuring it out - it was really driving me crazy.

/b

_________________
Brett Simms
http://www.heavyartillery.com

Actually, the small gap isn't the only problem. If you make the gap large, it will render a bit faster, but still slower than when the objects intersect. I think the issue is the diamond mesh itself, which produces some complex light paths that take a long time to compute (like total internal reflection). When the meshes intersect, the complex bounces inside the diamond no longer happen, so less work is needed to solve the image.

That's a catch-22 though, because it doesn't look much like a diamond without that internal light complexity. It just looks like a grey chunk of glass when it intersected.

In any case, it's good to know it's not a glitch. I was pretty sure that I had tested it with the mesh in various intersections etc and it didn't seem to be causing the problem of speed, but I probably just screwed that up. I did for sure still have some weirdness with some files rendering slow on export out of Max, which rendered faster when I simply imported all the elements into a new Studio scene, but perhaps that is something different going on. I'll send a scene if I can reproduce it clearly again.

Thanks /b

_________________
Brett Simms
http://www.heavyartillery.com