Biped and VRay Mesh

[gilpo]

Hi,
We are working on a drive-though animation that has a lot of moving people. All our people are fully 3D with animated footsteps for the paths. As they are all really high-poly we would like to find a way to somehow 'bake-in' the biped animation so they could be proxied out.

Currently, just opening the file with just the animations puts a computer with 3gb of ram at full memory usage.

We are already compositing, but putting the animations into the same file as the rest of the scene (all vray meshes) to use the matte settings crashes the system because of ram usage.

If anyone knows how to proxy these guys out or to collapse or bake-in the animation, or any other ideas, please let me know. We need to start rendering soon and can't get all these to render.

Thanks very much in advance,
Matt

[vlado]

If you are not going to use motion blur for the people, you can probably try some scripts to animate vray proxy objects and change the proxy mesh for each frame.

Best regards,
Vlado

[RErender]

Re: Biped and VRay Mesh

Hi,
how to ...bake-in the animation

You can bake the motion into a pointcache and get rid of the bipeds, only works well if the character is made of only one mesh.

[studioDIM]

How many polys per char?

I wrote a few point bakers that worked reasonably well in the last few years, but the problems with them could arise from the size of the mesh (hence the related vertex keyframes).
I don't quite understand what causes the memory overload: Physique skinning data? Biped keys? Raw number of polys?

You could, anyway, pay for PointOven, bake the animations out on disk in binary format, and read them back as displacement of vertices into PO's displacement modifier, hence removing the issues my scripts have with the number of associated keyframes.

Mark Wilson at Passion Pictures wrote it, i did some alpha and beta testing with him on the max side and fileformats, but never got to see the finished product.

You might wish to check it at http://www.ef9.com/ef9/PO.htm

It reports it as being max 5/6 only, so it might not work with later versions.

Hope it helps.

Lele

[gilpo]

Thanks for all the tips! RErender's tip was what I was looking for. The problem we are having is with the actual biped and its associated keyframes. With 8 bipeds animated over 4000 keyframes, the files stop opening on a computer with 4gb of ram. Each character is about 90k polys each.

Now, here's the question, once I point cache a mesh, is there anyway to convert it into a vray mesh proxy? If not, I'll live, but it would be nice.

Thanks again for your help!

[RErender]

Glad that helps

The only way to save them as a vrmesh would be to save out a seperate mesh for every frame and the reload them at the correct frame/s, would take a little scripting.

[ShaunDon]

Holy cow that's gonna take a lot of server space if they really are high poly enough to require proxying. Maybe you should think about doing them as a separate pass?

Thanks for that suggestion too, Rerender. I've been wondering how to something like that in my tinkering with Character Studio.

Shaun

[gilpo]

Our proxy folder is alreay 1.2 gigs and we just started animating. We like to push limits. That and our clients won't take "no, we can't do that yet" for an answer. So, when they ask if we can do something, we just smile and say "sure". Then we come back to the office and spend the next week trying to figure out how to actually do it.

[studioDIM]

90k poly per char skinned?
Ouch.
Has to be THE record for a skinned object in max

My suggestion of pointoven (or scripting) came to get around the limitation for multiple mesh parts with pointcache.

Glad you found a better way, though

Lele

[gilpo]

Hmm....may have to consider point oven. We've got a few characters on bikes that can't be point cached.

*Sigh* More money....

Thanks!