about vrmesh simplified proxies in viewport

[chib]

Hi,

I'd like to know if it's possible to replace the automatically generated proxy of a vrmesh file by a custom made mesh in 3dsmax, via maxscript or directly by editing the binary file, and if so, are the vrmesh file specifications kept secret or can be made available (at least for the proxy mesh part) ?
Thank you,

Paul Jacamon,
TD @ Studio Hari, France.

[vlado]

You can specify a custom preview mesh when exporting the proxy from the vrmesh export dialog. The .vrmesh file format is part of the V-Ray SDK which is included with every installation, and there is also a library to help with the reading/writing of .vrmesh files.

Best regards,
Vlado

[chib]

Thank you! I'm gonna check for the read/write library asap. However I didn't find how to specify a custom mesh via the export dialog, did I miss something?
thanks,

Paul.

[vlado]

When you open the .vrmesh export dialog, there is an option called "Specify preview mesh", if you enable it, you can click on the button "Pick preview mesh" to select a mesh that will be used for the preview.

Best regards,
Vlado

[chib]

My bad. I must have been looking in the wrong (1.5) documentation. Sorry about that. Is there a keyword argument to do that in maxscript? Although it could be a good start to put my hands in C++ and max/vray SDK if it's not possible

vrayMeshExport [meshFile:"<mesh file>"]
[autoCreateProxies:true|false] [exportMultiple:true|false]
[animation:on|off] [animationRange:#scene|#explicit]
[animationStart:<integer>] [animationEnd:<integer>]
[animationRedrawViews:true|false]
[maxPreviewFaces:<integer>]

thank you,
Paul.

[vlado]

Looks like this is not included in the vrayMeshExport function - will make a note to add it. Let me know if you need it urgently and we can do this relatively quickly.

Best regards,
Vlado

[chib]

It could be great, but I can also ask people to do that manually for the moment, and I'll implement functions to build vrmesh automatically later. Actually we are still in a early stage of the production, so this is a thing that we have to talk about and see if we have to automate this process or not.
thank you very much,

Paul.

[chib]

We are finally planning to make an intense use of vray proxies in our scenes, and use them as a strong replacement of xrefs for non-animated meshes, being able to update them and having high resolution objects at render time while keeping viewport usable proxies for layout and animation purpose. that's cool! So it could be nice to automate their production in a few maxscript steps. How much time do you think it would take to implement the "custom proxy" option in the maxscript function? will it be included in a future build?
Thanks,

Paul.

[vlado]

We can do it fairly quickly for the "stable_2.2" branch of the nightly builds - I will post here when it is done, hopefully in a couple of days.

Best regards,
Vlado

[chib]

great!
thanks,

Paul.