We need a robust API for efficient instancing on rendertime, exceptionally important for heavy particle rendering.
Right now, pflow or any other particle system in max mesh all geometry before sending it to render, needing a lot of time to prepare the scene, and using high amount of ram.
So far, the only real solution I see to render over 50M of particles in max is only and exclusively Frost, using VrayInstancing (but here again we can only use this with this specific renderer). We have as well VrayInstancer, more limited in options, that works with pflow/PRT/TP but is less efficient.
So right now we are tight to be using one specific renderer, making this impossible for example with the actual default renderer (Arnold). Even Arnold deals very well with heavy geometry, trying to render 5M particles in Pflow can take over 10 minutes of preparation time to render (not including rendering, only preparing the mesh), The same using the tandem Frost/VrayInstancing is under 5 seconds.
We need ideally a rebuild of 3dsmax API to allow any third party renderer to adopt it for efficient rendering (lots of time), or at least support your own renderer (Arnold), and create a ProceduralScatter over particles, to at least have an in house solution for heavy particle instancing.
