how does vray handle xref scenes?

[flipside]

Hi,

Here's my problem: I have control room where I need to place 20 machines. All machines are the same. I made one max file with the maxine, and one file with the control room.

Now I wanna xref the machine scene into the control room. When I use xref scene, I need to do this 20 times, because I cannot instance the xref scene 20 times.

When I use xref objects, I can instance it 20 times easily, but then when I add objects to my machine file, I need to load them into the control room scene etc... and this is a mess and never works well.

So I wanna use xref scene instead of xref object. In fact I'm doing this already, and it works great. But I need to do this 20 times and each time link it to a dmmy to be able to move/rotate it.

How can I instance the machine scene 20 times in my control room file? The machine file is heavy, so I really need instancing and not normal copies.

If I xref scene the machine file 20 times into the control room file, how does vray handle this geometry? Will it load the xref scene 20 times? And how does max handle this? Because my control room file will be unmanagable with 20 copies of the machine scene instead of 20 instances.

So any help on this xref scene matter is greatly appreciated! (and very urgent )

thanks,

wouter

[Gijs]

can't you make a proxy out of it?

[Morbid Angel]

flipside there is a substitute modifier, which allows you to sub your mesh with another mesh from an xref file, you can instance a box 20 times, then substitute it with your machine and it will update everytime you make a change. The downfall of this is you have to have all pieces of the machinery attached as a single mesh, as it can only sub 1 object.

[flipside]

That problem also occurs with proxies then. I will also need to make 1 mesh out of it to generate the multi sub object material for it (proxies don't take materials with them). The thing is that I'm not using a mesh, but an imported rhino model with powertranslator, so making it a mesh requires yet another additional step.

The problem of updating might be gone because of tight deadline so maybe I can just merge the machine into the file and instance it there.

I wonder why an xref scene can't be copied and moved/rotated like xref objects. That's really a pity.

[flipside]

I ended up using proxies

It worked better than I could ever imagine!

The only problem was creating my detailed nurbs model into 1 big mesh with a multi sub object mat on it. After I converted the whole nurbs data to mesh objects, I tried to use the attach list function to attach them all together. Doing so resulted in a crash after 5 seconds. Ram usage went all crazy, don't know why. So I needed to attach fewer objects in several steps, which eventually worked.

Using this workflow in earlier stages of a project would not be that good, since the whole process of attaching and applying the multisubobject material is quite time consuming.

[Morbid Angel]

flipside attaching heavy multiple objects in max performs memory leak and max crashes which is a known issue and which discreet is unable to resolve due to max's core. The trick is to attach several objects at once then execute gc() command to clear ram then do it again. Not the best but ....

[flipside]

Ok Now I closed max each time ram went a bit to high hehe, thanks!