Open with Maya a scene with the object you want to make a proxy of. STEP 1: OPEN YOUR THE OBJECT YOU WANT TO BECOME A MENTAL RAY PROXY This can allow you to render much bigger scenes with the same amount of RAM on your PC: we are talking about BILLIONS of polygons rendered in less than 1GB of ram. The speed improvement will not be only in maya render process but also in your maya 3d viewport!Īs we said one of the major benefit of proxy objects is that they are only loaded on demand at render time, just when they are absolutely needed for the render result. The maya renderer (Mental Ray) will manage these thousands of objects in a very performing way. This will allow you to populate your scene with hundreds of cubes (trees), without worrying about maya crashes or mental ray's out of errors. The cool thing is that you can use a simple cube to represent a 2.000,000 tris polygon tree. Each mental ray proxy is loaded during render time (it' called 'on demand') instead of simple meshes (like cubes) that you use to position proxies inside your scene, once you hit render that simple cubes are replaced by full detailed mesh. Mental Ray Proxy objects don’t really exist in your scene, in fact you can't modify or edit them in your maya scene. Mental Ray Proxy objects are like maya instances. They make your scenes lighter and faster at render, saving lot of usage during maya render process. Mental ray Proxy objects are used in many situations and can give you a lot of benefits in terms of usage and cpu load. Mental Ray proxies are often used to render scenes with hundreds of high-resolution trees and vegetation in a very simple manner. They are used to render an insane amount of polygons in a single scene. Have you ever heard about v-ray proxies? Well, Mental ray and v-ray proxies are the same thing with different names. Today we are going to take a look at Proxy Objects in Mental Ray for Maya.

Maya env ball mental ray