PointCloud for VRay Proxy.

[joelly3d]

I've been using Rail clone and Forest Pack Pro a bunch lately. The way they display their meshes as clouds is awesome. Auto-point cloud generation and representation of an object with sliders to reduce or add points and it is super fast in the viewport. This would be super rad to have as an add to VRay proxy.

[vlado]

Hm, I know users who complained about the point clouds and preferred the simplified mesh preview that we have in the V-Ray proxy.

Best regards,
Vlado

[joelly3d]

I suppose the option to use either would be rad. Personally, I am really liking the point cloud display stuff.

[Neilg]

I find the forest point clouds difficult to get a read on what's actually happening - if leaves are intersecting etc.

You could always use forest for everything - there's the reference object distribution method in the new version so you can link them all to dummies for fine control and display as point cloud.

[vlado]

I suppose the option to use either would be rad. Personally, I am really liking the point cloud display stuff.

I would be reluctant to do that. It would mean having to read and parse all of the proxy's geometry, which kind of defeats the purpose of the proxy.

Best regards,
Vlado

[thescopeteam]

when creating a proxy there is an option "Export Point Clouds? what is it for? currently we create a mesh preview in Houdini, looks way better than the vray triangle mesh with less polygons. But this workaround is timeconsuming

[Moriah]

I requested a few months ago in the vray for houdini forum, if it was possible to actually display the point cloud like forest pro does... i think they said they would see what could be done.

[Dart_Design]

Also missing point cloud mesh preview for vray proxy. This is really essential preview option and I do not understand why even latest Vray version does not have it. It helps to save performance in viewport a lot and the user has the option to change the point cloud density for any Proxy mesh any time. As workaround for now I use corona renderer proxy, seems to work OK with Vray 5+...
UPD: corona proxy is supported, but it leads to much longer scene parsing time. Also if you cancel rendering, it runs a lot slower

[^Lele^]

Besides what everyone else may tell you, i don't think there's going to be a substitute for figuring it out by yourself.
The page linked in the article you mention is a good place to start the evaluation.

[Dart_Design]

OK, now we have Chaos Scatter and it can do nice point cloud previews for scattered meshes.
But for proxies not only me and joelly3d thescopeteam are still missing point cloud preview option, but I believe many other users find this function also useful. Why?

- Because you can control the cloud density on the fly, in other modes this is simply impossible
- Because in comparison to preview mesh mode it has almost no impact on viewport performance
- Because in most of the cases it can better represent original parts of the model.

For example, trees:
At the following link you can see that with preview mesh mode we need always to guess what optimal face count some mesh need. Otherwise we have a big chance that tree trunk simply disappear . With point cloud we can dynamically adjust the point density after exporting to proxy, which is great.
It would be great if the end user can also have point cloud mode to choose from.

https://ibb.co/1GHPfg2
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https://ibb.co/55n6jpX