Only render objects/parts of the image with changed material (VFB the same)

[OccultMonk]

I frequently edit certain materials and only want to view their effects so it would be very useful if only those parts o the render with these materials get rerendered and the frame buffer for the rest stays the same. This could, for instance, be an addition to Render selected drop-down.

Maybe you could add an option to only render objects or places where the material was updated. So when I change a material in 3dsmax slate material editor, only the objects (or better yet parts of objects) with that changed material get re-rendered (the rest of the framebuffer can stay the same). This should of course also work for multi-subobject materials.

[Njen]

I doubt this is possible for two main reasons:
1. Max doesn't keep track of material updates in between renders.
2. As a path tracing renderer, one surface updating actually affects everything around it, as rays are bouncing all over the place.

[OccultMonk]

For the second point, that is not really a problem. I just would like it to select objects/subobjects with changed materials automatically. Reflections being incorrect is not so important when iterating using interactive rendering.