forest using vray proxy objects as it's source geometry causes horrible lag on render end before releasing memory and unfreezing max

[joconnell]

Hi Folks!

With forest 5.4 and vray 3.60.03 on max 2016 sp4, if you use vray proxy objects (3 million poly trees) as your source for a terrain (a very large scene - maybe 250,000 - 1000000 trees in the fpack) it causes a huge lockup of max when the frame finishes before it gets freed up for user input. Not sure if this is a known issue but it might be worth looking at. We were trying to keep scenes as light as possible but we'll switch to dumb mesh or xmesh mesh in the interim.

Cheers!

John

[yavor.rubenov]

Hello,

We had similar reports with instanced proxies with multiple voxels inside. For such cases there is an option in the V-Ray mesh export dialog - "Optimize for instancing". When a mesh is exported this way - the proxy is created with a single voxel and behaves much better when instanced.

Best regards,
Yavor

[tricky]

Why can't this be set on by default?

[yavor.rubenov]

It is On by default.
The problem is that it is a relatively new option that affects proxy creation. So if you have proxies created before that option appeared - you might get the issue.

Best regards,
Yavor

[anthonyh]

Maybe an external utility to update old vrmesh files ? It can be very time consuming to re-export everything and sometimes the original files just don`t exist. For example we`ve used a Turbosquid stadium with dozens of vray proxies for seats, people etc and it wouldn`t be feasible for us to update the proxies and no guarantee the original modeller will do it either. And then what happens if you change it again ? This situation doesn`t seem ideal when it comes to respecting legacy files of which every `old` vrmesh has become since the new change I presume ?
Have I posted this before on another thread ? I`m getting deja-vu. (booo to emoticons, sideways text is better !)
anthonyh

[joconnell]

Thanks Yavor - you're right that a lot of our files are overhangs from previous shows, I'll update them!

[joconnell]

That's worked beautifully Yavor - quicker and lighter than xmesh!

[joconnell]

Just as a dumb confirmation - if I want to update all of our proxies using this, has there ever been any reported cases of setting a vrayproxy to display all faces, collapsing it to poly and then reexporting to update it? I can't think of any reason why but some folks in here are a bit cagey about it!

[yavor.rubenov]

You could use the "Import as mesh" button and then reexport. The proxy scale should be at 1.0 when doing that.

And yes we should probably add some tool for the conversion or some option to ply2vrmesh tool.

Best regards,
Yavor

[joconnell]

Superstar! Is there a maxscript command equivalent of the import as mesh button so I can automate the lot?

Thanks again!

[yavor.rubenov]

Yes - the vrayMeshImport MAXScript function:

vrayMeshImport [proxy: <proxy mesh object(s)>] [explicitNormals: true|false] [weldVertices: true|false]

Imports the geometry of the selected VRayProxy object(s) as an editable mesh <proxy mesh object(s)> is a single VRayProxy object, an array of VRayProxy objects or an ObjectSet (for example $geometry) . If this option is not specified VRayProxy object(s) from the current selection are imported as mesh(es).

[joconnell]

That's great Yavor - we've got to update some asset publishing things here that make our vray proxies so this'll be very useful to update things as we need them!

[squintnic]

my god, this has just saved me 30 min post render hangs on files with old proxies

[joconnell]

I love the way that most of the time I run into a problem, the chaos guys have already thought about it and there's a fix in the build I'm using but just didn't know about yet...