March of the clones

[Aldaryn]

But a compressed file needs to be decompressed before use, so considering that rendertimes depend strongly on how fast can you access the proxy, it might not be the best thing to do.

Bes regards,

A.

[vlado]

Disk access is so slow, that any decompression time is negligible... futher on, since less data needs to be read from the disk, this may actually turn out to be faster...

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morbid Angel]

Disk access is so slow, that any decompression time is negligible... futher on, since less data needs to be read from the disk, this may actually turn out to be faster...

Best regards,
Vlado

but, if you have a very large proxy, being read by multiple machines over the network, could that have an effect?

[RErender]

Should be even better in that case since decompression is done locally on each node. For instance, saving a 100MB Max file over a network is many times faster when that file is compressed since the main bottleneck is the network speed.

[Aldaryn]

Disk access is so slow, that any decompression time is negligible... futher on, since less data needs to be read from the disk, this may actually turn out to be faster...

I see, didn't knew how the processing times were related. But than again, what you say is fully logical, so my bad. I'm really happy that you constantly work on the proxies, imo it's one of VRay's best features.

Bes regards,

A.

[vlado]

but, if you have a very large proxy, being read by multiple machines over the network, could that have an effect?

Well, the compression will not change anything in this regard; you have the same thing happening now even without animated proxies.

Best regards,
Vlado

[^Lele^]

Confrabulations for your continued work on proxies, Vlado.
Going a bit OT, and speaking of compression, and network traffic/speed, did you do any work on IRMap/LC/Photon Map embedding into the max file (if you remember that script I did that embedded them into nulls...)?
That, coupled with the maxzip compression of the max file should make for even better handing of files across networks.

[Da_elf]

here is a really good question. maybe i missed it somewhere.

when it reached the end of the animation what happens? can you add in pingpong, loop and hold options? and with pingpong since it will be going backwards would the velocity channel be correct.

[vlado]

when it reached the end of the animation what happens? can you add in pingpong, loop and hold options?

There are currently "Loop", "Play once", "Ping-pong" and "Frozen" modes.

And with pingpong since it will be going backwards would the velocity channel be correct.

Yep.

Best regards,
Vlado

[dellis]

This is going to be very cool!

[Da_elf]

the rapture and the joy i feel every time i see this post. doing an army of soldier crabs is now a possibility

[dimo]

Very Nice,

who was that guy who wanted to write the Massive2VRay bridge?
(just kidding)

Best regards,

Dieter

[^Lele^]

Vlado, sorry to bring this up again, but i'm really curious.
No answer means you're not planning/haven't done any work on the subject of saving irmaps and such within the max file?
If so, i'm fairly sure i could turn that test into a workable version to be distributed, only it'd need a bit of care and a wee bit of work, hence the question...

[vlado]

Nope, didn't have time for this; we had a lot of stuff planned for SP2 but the early release of 3ds Max 2009 will cause us to leave many of the things which are not complete yet for the next update and include only the features that we have completed so far (plus the bug fixes, of course).

Best regards,
Vlado

[jonnybefree]

now that sounds nice!!

what about things like cloth sim. are they stored too?
and sorry for maybe the dump question, but what is it for a workflow? you can animate with no matter what tool like cat.. and export then to proxi, so he writes sort of a snapshot for each?
when you want to modify, you just export again?