Animated Textures and Image Sequences in Vantage Best Practices?

[abraham_ahmad]

I'm curious if there a proper way to set up animated textures in Vray for 3ds Max for Vantage. I currently have two methods:

Method 1: Load Sequence in Vray Bitmap/ Bitmap as a sequence

Using this method I notice that while scrubbing the time bar in 3ds max, both Max and Vantage stutter and become laggy. Even just having the animated texture in a slot in the material editor causes the stutter.


Method 2: Load all the frames of the image sequence in a VrayMultiSubTex (Thank you batch load!), set "Get Id From:" to "Face material ID". Now place a "Material" Modifier on the object and animate the value of the Material ID appropriately.

This method does not suffer from the same lag as the more conventional one.

Are there any downsides setting up something like this? Is there are better way of doing this?

[vladimir.nedev]

Using this method I notice that while scrubbing the time bar in 3ds max, both Max and Vantage stutter and become laggy. Even just having the animated texture in a slot in the material editor causes the stutter.

If you want to reduce the stutter, you can try using lower resolution textures.
Each time you change the current frame, Vantage (and 3dMax too) has to load the texture from disk to CPU memory.

At some point in the future, we might add a CPU cache that remembers the last loaded images up to some memory limit, that will help with the stutter.

Method 2: Load all the frames of the image sequence in a VrayMultiSubTex (Thank you batch load!), set "Get Id From:" to "Face material ID". Now place a "Material" Modifier on the object and animate the value of the Material ID appropriately.

The downside of this method is that Vantage will preload all frames of the image sequence in CPU and GPU memory.
Edit: actually if you have dynamic textures ON, the frames not currently needed will be loaded at a very low resolution to GPU memory, so they will take only a tiny amount of GPU memory.
Their full resolution version (and mip maps) will still be in CPU memory however.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[martin_hulse]

I tried your second method you mentioned but although it works in Max it does not in Vantage, is there anything I need to adjust in Vantage to get this method to work?

[vladimir.nedev]

The second method practically animates the mesh geometry (changes the face material IDs each frame), this is something we have support for in future builds, but not in 1.8.x.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev