VRay Proxy playback

[Garryclarke]

Hi,

One of the departments of the company I work work for calculates explosive demolition. They work out the location of the charges and then run a simulation to make sure that the building collapses the way they want too. They get me to turn this into 'nice' animations.

The output from the engineering sim software is a separate model per frame in obj Format which I convert to VRay Proxies.

building_000.vrmesh
building_001.vrmesh
building_002.vrmesh
building_003.vrmesh
etc...

I've been getting them to play back using 'Expand # to frame number' so if I have a sequence of 200 proxies they only appear in the frame that they required. This works great but causes a problem I have an animation longer than the sequence, for example if the animation is 300 frames long then the model would disappear from frame 201 onwards. I've been working around this by having separate proxies for the first and last models and hiding them, but is a bit kludgy and prone to errors.

Would it be possible to add the following options:
Offset the starting frame: So I could start the animation at any frame. At the moment I have to renumber all the files.
Hold the first model: if the sequence is set to start on frame 100 then use the first model from the sequence for the first 100 frames.
Hold the last model: Once the model sequence comes to an end just hold the last model in every subsequent frame.

Hope this makes sense.

Garry

[hermit.crab]

There already is an integrated start frame offset in the Animation options of the VRayProxy; add an offset of -50 for example for the animation to start 50 frames later. Also, I presume using the 'Play once' playback mode would do what you described.

[Garryclarke]

Hi Aleksander,

Yes that control looks just right. However it's greyed out as I have a sequence of vrmesh files and not an alembic file.
As far as I'm aware I can't create a single file from a sequence of files (each file has a different number of verts)

[Garryclarke]

This shows the greyed out box, if this was accessible I would have everything I need.

[hermit.crab]

What you may try to do is use the 'ply2vrmesh.exe' utility tool to combine all your .obj files into a single animated .vrmesh, where each frame is a single .obj. For example:

"C:\Program Files\Chaos Group\V-Ray\3ds Max 2020\bin\ply2vrmesh.exe" "C:\Users\Alexander\Desktop\a_?.obj" "C:\Users\Alexander\Desktop\testingtool\a.vrmesh"

[Garryclarke]

Hi Aleksandar,

Thanks for the info - I didn't realise that I could combine all the .objs into one .vrmesh. I'll try it out on the next project.

Thanks
Garry