animated vrmesh start offset.

[chib]

Hi,

I' got this little problem lately: when I record an animated vrmesh file, if there is no animation at the beginning, frames are not recorded until things really change. This is a behaviour similar to pointchache modifier I believe, but I managed to resolve the problem by making my own pointcache recorder ^^. The problem is that I don't know how to set the good offset when I load the vrmesh file. Is there a way to force recording of the full range, even if there is nothing moving, or to get the good offset when loading the vrmesh?
thanks,

Paul.

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Could you please attach a sample scene.
We've done some tests but we couldn't reproduce the issue.

[chib]

Unfortunately I can't upload files from here, some proxy/fw problem I guess...
I tested in an empty scene, with a PFlow emitter which starts to emit particles at 50. Then in order to bake them I turn them in a 'mesher', which I then convert to vrmesh. When reloaded the vrmesh starts at 0.
That make me think that I've not been very precise in my description: the problem doesn't seem to happen when some mesh actually exists from the beginning, but in this precise case, meshes start to appear at 50, and so the problem would rather be that vrmesh cannot record empty frames, or something like that, which would be more logic, but still a bit problematic for me
Thanks,
Paul.

[chib]

I realize something quite weird while testing some stuff: when a mesh has 0 vertices in the middle of its animation (ex: a Pflow with 2 birth events at 2 different moments (somebody said fireworks?) , then the animated vrmesh resulting of this object removes all the empty frames and only plays frames where vertices actually exists. then it becomes quite complicated to restore the original animation.

Paul.

PS: there was a .vrmesh file attached to the file but it was to big to be uploaded, so there is only the .max scene with an emitter, a mesher and an empty proxy.
test_animated_vrmesh2.zip

[vlado]

Hm, I thought we fixed this some time ago, but perhaps it was done for ply2vrmesh only, and not for the built-in exporter in 3ds Max. Will fix it.

A work-around would be to export another small object (f.e. a small cube) together with the particle mesh in one single .vrmesh file.

Best regards,
Vlado

[chib]

I forgot to say I'm working here with the 1.5 version, but I work at part-time in an other studio that uses VRay 2, so I tend to forget to precise which version I'm actually working with, sorry about that.
Thanks for the work-around, I've been thinking of a more complicated solution, which guess start and end frames by checking the number of vertex and then which set an offset and a visibility track, but the "small cube" trick is far simplier and sufficiant.
Thanks,

Paul.