vrayscatter and/or vrayfur with instanced geometry

[zoobadoo]

hi, hope this is not a re-post!

scatter and maxfur (with instanced geometry) do a great job in creating greenery for arch viz and other stuff.

it's working also very good to collapse them to vrayproxies and instance them around the scene.

if these proxies get very big though (like a proxie with lot's of leaves covering a whole building, or even several buildings) vray tends to slow down on those, especially the LC and IrrMap prepasses. I've seen dropdown's in cpu usage to like 5-10%. proxies are perfect, but i guess one should build relatively smal ones and instance those around to keep mem and cpu happy.(please correct me if i'm wrong here..).

the workaround is not scattering/furring these big objects, but splitting them down to smaller pieces. this takes a lot of work, and max does not allow much scripting on scattering either. so before you know you end up instancing proxies around manually, creating a lot of repetition which shows in your actual render. basicly i like the scatter and fur because you can create basic geometry and have these function's do the rest.

would be great to have a vrayscatter and/or instanced geometry option inside vrayfur, with all the memory and speed advantages we got used to from vray

thanks

[^Lele^]

Re: vrayscatter and/or vrayfur with instanced geometry

if these proxies get very big though (like a proxie with lot's of leaves covering a whole building, or even several buildings) vray tends to slow down on those, especially the LC and IrrMap prepasses. I've seen dropdown's in cpu usage to like 5-10%. proxies are perfect, but i guess one should build relatively smal ones and instance those around to keep mem and cpu happy.(please correct me if i'm wrong here..).

The low cpu usage is due to the DISK speed: with a huge mesh to load, the cpu has to wait for it to be read from disk.

the workaround is not scattering/furring these big objects, but splitting them down to smaller pieces. this takes a lot of work, and max does not allow much scripting on scattering either. so before you know you end up instancing proxies around manually, creating a lot of repetition which shows in your actual render. basicly i like the scatter and fur because you can create basic geometry and have these function's do the rest.

In fact there have been a couple of scripted solutions for this: using particles and a simple script, or using a proxy planter (a script i prepared a while back, and never released to the wide public).
In both cases, i can assure you the end result looks believable, and renders fast.
In general, proxying into a single mesh many objects IS a bad idea, as it defeats the purpose of loading on demand (one big mesh HAS to be loaded all in ram, and will not be unloaded until isn't needed anymore).
It would be a nicer wish, imho, if the proxying command allowed to generate one proxy per object from the selected ones.

I know the proxying process has been opened to maxscript, i'll look into it to see what's doable.

[jacksc02]

we await your magic!

[zoobadoo]

particles could be a good alternative for scatter. are they light in memory usage at rendertime? they are scriptable for sure, so that's good. i'll look into it, thanks for the tip.

It would be a nicer wish, imho, if the proxying command allowed to generate one proxy per object from the selected ones.

you can, simply right click a selection and use export to multiple files. but i guess you knew that, so is assume you mean exporting already instanced geometry...this is tricky as i never found a scripted sloution to check whether an object is an instance or not. groupmembers have the simple .isGroupHead read out, but .isInstance is not available in Maxscript. I did an interesting script which collapses your selection to a single mesh with multisubobjectmaterials applied automatically. great for proxied hiress car's and stuff. can't share it here unfortunatly.