Re: How to model a huge stack of poker chips?

Actually its a common misconception that instancing will speed up rendertime. It really doesn't. It will significantly reduce the amount of memory used. I think the speedup you are seeing is the actual tesselation time (maya will tesselate all geometry types into polygons, except poly's of course). the instancing allows maya to tesselate one chip and apply that tessellation to all of the chips that share its instance. When its rendering, its still rendering the same number of pixels and polygons though.