Vray Proxy with groups for Materials

[Jon3D]

My Goal is to reduce the file size of vrscenes.

For that I saved out some of the geometry in the vrscene as proxys. That reduces my file size a lot but I loose the possibility to assign different materials to groups etc. I can only assign one material to the whole proxy after that.

Is there some technique to achieve something like in the example picture? To save out the proxy and then assign different materials and create the vrscene.

kind regards
Jon

[bdancer]

1. To assign multiple materials to proxy use "VRay Proxy Material"
2. Better use Alembic, we support "shop_materialpath" attribute on Alembics (you'll need to force material export on ROP for now, will be improved).

[Jon3D]

Uh nice. That sounds good. I will have a look at this.
Thank you!!

[Jon3D]

(you'll need to force material export on ROP for now, will be improved).

may I ask you to be more specific about that? I can get it to work with proxy and proxymaterial but not with alembic.

alembic workflow would be to import the alembic with vrayProxyImport right? And it should read the primitive attribute shop_materialpath and render it with correct materials if they are in the scene?

[bdancer]

1. Set shop_materialpath on the geomety (basically u just apply material with the material node).
2. Bake geometry to abc.
3. Load abc back to Houdini to the same scene (so that shop_materialpath is valid e.g. points to valid material nodes).
4. Force materials that are used in shop_materialpath in ROP objects tab (this way those material will be availabe render time / inside vrscene)
5. Now if u render, it'll load alembic and apply materials render time using values in shop_materialpath.

There are also some forum topic regarding this feature.

[Jon3D]

Sorry I missunderstood the force material on ROP in your first post. It works now.
Thanks.