Creating VRay proxy from treestorm trees gives maxscript error

[Steve_Green]

Hi,

I'm trying to create looping animations from Onyx treestorm trees by using proxies and I am constantly getting errors.

In Treestorm, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to set a loop for a tree animated by wind, so I've used morph-o-matic to blend the end frame.

However, when I convert it to a VRay Proxy, I get a maxscript error - this also happens when I just use a basic Onyx Tree, so it doesn't appear to be down to the morphing plugin.

The animations are reasonably long (about 360 frames), but it seems more prone to happen if it's a longer animation or a higher poly count tree.

Unfortunately I didn't make a not of the exact maxscript error, but has anyone come across anything similar, or have a suggestion?

Thanks,

Steve

[3DMK]

Sounds like a memory issue!

I have found that the Onyx treestorm plugin is very unstable when it comes to doing wind on large polycount trees [In previous versions anyway]

Just remember that every frame of your animation you are creating another tree mesh so memory handling is very important & I think it's just that Onyx is not really optimised for this.

Maybe it's just max running out of memory?? Are you in 32 or 64 bit?

I don't think you need anymore frames than 100 unless the tree is the focus of the shot.

Reason being that 4 seconds is enough to do a looping anim and you will save bucket loads of RAM by not doing all 360 frames.

Vray proxys can also loop in a ping-pong method which is perfect for tree movement.


You could also try doing the tree in 2 parts. Have all the branches as one animated proxy and the leaves as another animated proxy. This will help if it's a RAM issue.

Hope this helps

[Steve_Green]

Hi,

yeah running 64bit with 8 gig of RAM - creating a mesher object referencing the TS object seems fine, so I'm not sure if it's as simple as memory.

The 360 was picked out because that seemed to be a close to loop as it got - I tried ping-pong and it looks a bit poor to my eyes.

Basically I'm creating a looping wallpaper of a forest, which in itself needs to be at least 30 secs, maybe it will be OK to just have 4 secs as long as there's enough randomly offset.

Cheers,

Steve

[vlado]

Does it work if you convert a tree to a regular mesh first? If yes - can you get me one of those trees to vlado@chaosgroup.com so that I can check what is the problem?

Best regards,
Vlado

[instinct]

I have done that before. I am not 100% sure and would have to check. But i think what i did was adding a pointcache modifier on top, pointcache result, turn off the other mods and exported that. Another thing i MIGHT have done is snapshot to mesh for each frame. TBH i just cant say anymore :/