Vray proxy size

[tricky]

We are trying to use AXYZ Anima in a production of ours, and may have to convert all the animated people meshes into a large animated proxy (because of Anima's limitations with XREF Scenes). I created a test proxy with a collection of walking people, and the file size approached 3GB for 100 frames of animation! The live project has around 600-750 frames of animated people, so aI dread to think what the size of the proxy might be

We have had large files before when creating Onyx trees with wind animation (a 3GB tree for instance), but this looks like something far far bigger.

What are the limitations with proxies? Must the whole proxy fit into RAM in order to render? There are perhaps 100 people in this vrayproxy scattered around a large area. I could potentially create a vrayproxy for each animated person, but this would take a while and presumably the total file size would be the same (at various points, all the animated people will be in shot at the same time, though from a moderate distance as the camera flys backwards and upwards into the sky).

If I can keep the animated file as an Anima file, the file is only around 11MB, so it would be frustrating to have to create a vrayproxy. I will continue to see if this is possible, but I do wonder what the limitations of proxies are.

Our systems have 16GB RAM which is a reasonable amount, but if a vrayproxy is 10GB(!), this could be a serious issue.

[joconnell]

I didn't use Anima but in a couple of 200 frame + shots on game of thrones I used point cached low poly models of a looping walk cycle with characters on path constraints and it worked out fine (the xml point cache format is a disaster btw) without any kind of proxy. There were maybe 20 different types of people in each shot instanced. As regards proxies, vray will for starters only load up the bits it needs per bucket, and better still, only for that specific frame so even if your proxy file is huge it'll only be taking a specific frame of the 600 you've cached.

[tricky]

I didn't use Anima but in a couple of 200 frame + shots on game of thrones I used point cached low poly models of a looping walk cycle with characters on path constraints and it worked out fine (the xml point cache format is a disaster btw) without any kind of proxy. There were maybe 20 different types of people in each shot instanced. As regards proxies, vray will for starters only load up the bits it needs per bucket, and better still, only for that specific frame so even if your proxy file is huge it'll only be taking a specific frame of the 600 you've cached.

Thanks joconnell - this is good to know. I wonder if vrayproxy has any kind of internal compression going on - that would certainly help with disk space.

A further question: if my vrayproxy file is 10GB and I send out a DR job to 12 machines, will each machine load the 10GB proxy into some sort of local location, or will they just load the buckets they need on a frame-by-frame basis? The same question goes for a BB job: does each node just load the bucket it needs when it needs it from the central network? I'm just interested to know how much network traffic might be caused and if it will be a problem with a 10GB proxy on a gigabit network with a managed switch...

[joconnell]

As far as I know there's no compression as such - perhaps the decompression would add on another large amount of overhead compared to the cheapness of disk space right now. Vlado mentioned that only the needed section will be loaded from disk but I'm not sure if what you're talking about is a vray thing or a windows thing in terms of the proxy file being copied.

[ivaylo.ivanov]

The main purpose of the proxies is to divide a big mesh into chunks and load only the part that is currently rendered. The file size doesn't matter.

[super gnu]

i can 2nd joconnel for meshes with pointcache2 files. done several thousand people in a scene with this method. 10 diff. people, 4 different walk cycles, so 40 combinations and 40 pc2 files. looping walk cycle, animated along paths. then just adjust the keyframes until the feet look locked to the floor. never perfect but fine for anything not in the foreground.

[wxyz]

Are you using the automatic VRay material in Anima? I'm asking because the materials don't seem to show textures in the Max viewport.

[tricky]

Are you using the automatic VRay material in Anima? I'm asking because the materials don't seem to show textures in the Max viewport.

Yes I am. I'll be getting back onto Anima during the next few days. I'll let you know if I have any VP issues.

[joconnell]

I wrote a utility to automate this since most people will take 2 steps per second, and you can work out by the length of one step how much distance they should cover per secopnd in max units. Once you've got this you can measure the length of your spline and get the appropriate percent so it matches the distance of the character's gait.

[pg1]

I am about to go through and point cache a bunch of people doing several short walk cycles for a typical arch viz animation. I have use point cache for this many times before. Has anyone successfully used vray animated proxies for this type of animation? and what are the advantages/disadvantages?

Hey John,
Any chance of getting that utility to get the appropriate percent to characters gait?

[vlado]

I wonder if vrayproxy has any kind of internal compression going on - that would certainly help with disk space.

I seem to have missed this question - yes, the data in the .vrmesh files is compressed. The compression usually reduces the size 3 to 5 times.

Best regards,
Vlado