iborg64 opened this issue on May 26, 2013 · 5 posts
ShawnDriscoll posted Sun, 26 May 2013 at 7:13 PM
If a pixel in your rendered frame can be ray-traced back to a tree, it will render/generate data for that tree. In general, if the tree is off camera, just the lighting calculations from it are used (like GI and GR), which is almost like rendering the tree anyway. Some trees glow their leaf colors, depending on their materials used. Their alpha mask is certainly generated though to get the shadows to appear in your frame.
But being off camera, there will be hardly any photon bouncing within leaves/branches of trees and certainly no applying of any AA to the rendering of them. So the CPU and RAM will skip over most of that process while rendering. But the trees will still occupy scene RAM.