Animated Vray Proxy : RAM Caching for playback acceleration in viewport ?

[smax]

Hello there,

We have walk cycles (loop) on 3D characters, which are made Animated Vray Proxies.
Only problem is we work with files on a fileserver, and any animated proxy played in the viewport won't cache in 3DSMAX RAM, so playback will always go and fetch data on the fileserver. (and each vrmesh is around 10Mo)

It's 100x slower playback than having each animated vrmesh in local.
Is there any way to cache vrayproxy ? (I tried point cache without success)

Thank you very much,

Marc

[smax]

Anyone having to deal with animated proxies yet ?

Thank you

[super gnu]

are the characters very high poly? if not, youll probably find it better to use editable meshes with a pointcache2 applied to them.. thats my usual workflow for doing lots of animated characters. you say you tried pointcache without success? as in with animated proxies, or generally? it wont work with proxies, but it should work just fine on normal meshes. just make sure you choose .pc2 as the file type when you save each pointcache.

another option would be to copy the proxies locally to each machine that needs em of course. on some scenes with a lot of big maps etc, we create a temp folder in the c drive of all rendernodes and copy the files locally there. i believe there is an option in backburner to do this automatically but ive never tried it.

[smax]

Hi there,

Well indeed you pointed out the problem. It's either working in local or not using proxies. (they're actually very low polygon character, like 500-1000 each). Also the loading of scene with animated proxies is very long.(maybe some optimisation to do by chaosgroup?) With backburner i guess there is the "include maps" option, but it won't (i think) handles Vrayproxy or other external files.
Also VrayProxy are usefull because it has a speed modifier, and an offset frame modifier to influence randomness like in a small crowd system maxscript.
It's also usefull to have hundreds of people rendering as VrayProxy and not meshes.

[super gnu]

i think you should definitely test and compare using pointcached instanced meshes.. ive found its faster to render, faster in the viewport, and not very memory hungry. proxies really come into their own with very high poly meshes. ive done several hundred characters with instanced meshes with no issues.

also, if you use pointcache2 files, you have speed and offset controls too. these can certainly be scripted.

[vlado]

Like super gnu suggested, point caching might work well too, and (contrary to popular belief) V-Ray can handle instances really well without them having to be proxies.

With that said, we do have local RAM cache of the proxy preview in V-Ray for Maya, perhaps we can do something similar for 3ds Max...

Best regards,
Vlado

[smax]

Hi Vlado,

Indeed it could be useful.
For example we had a project where we had to animate many many identical flowers which blossoms (with part of the plant being hundreds of medium res animated VrayProxy) and there it could be convenient to RAM cache the VrayProxy animation. (generally speaking, they are short animations)

Thank you

Marc