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General best practices

Introduction​

RailClone includes native shaders, making it possible to render high-poly objects over splines as long as kilometers. Usually, these techniques push a rendering engine to its limits. The following notes include technical information that can help you to optimize your renderings.

Common Tips​

RailClone is able to create complex parametric structures by cloning and adapting mesh objects (called Segments) along one or more reference objects (such as spline). According to the spline's direction, elevation or other parameters, some Segments must be deformed and others simply cloned.

In the supported engines, it's possible to render thousands of instances of the same object using minimal resources. RailClone uses this feature, identifying which Segments may be cloned, and creating native render instances of them. This process is automatic and invisible to the user, but you can optimize your renderings by paying attention to the following rules:

  • If you are certain that a type of Segment should never be deformed (such as pillars or joints), turn off 'Bend' in the Segments parameters. The same is applicable for 'Slice'.
  • It is possible to use meshes or proxies as Segments , but it is not necessary to convert high-poly objects to proxies to get better performance. The plugin converts all objects to native render instances internally, so there are no significant differences (on render time and memory used) between using meshes or proxies.
  • Proxies cannot be deformed, so RailClone always creates instances from them, but obviously they cannot be bent or sliced.

Some features are not available when using the native render mode:

You can switch to the standard render mode turning by off Display->Render->Use Instancing Engine . When this is used the plugin creates a single mesh containing all the geometry.

In any case, you can use RailClone Tools to generate the instanced geometry manually. This procedure is compatible with all render engines.