Alembic curves in VRayMesh-loader - control profile

[Dan Andersen]

Hello,

I haven't found a way to adjust the profile-shape, when reading alembic curves through the VRayMesh node. I'm doing barbs on feathers, and for this it would be helpful to either have a completely custom profile, a way to squash the produced cylinder in one axis, or a way to render the curves as flat ribbons. Is any of this possible?

Thanks,
Dan

[hermit.crab]

You wish to edit the profile of dynamic curves (i.e. from xGen) that are exported in .abc files and loaded in a VRay Proxy, correct?

[Dan Andersen]

Yes, correct!

So currently, if we sliced a rendered curve, the cross section would be a circle. For our particular case, the correct cross-section would be a rectangle with beveled corners, or an ellipse.

The curves are coming from Houdini in this case.

[Dan Andersen]

.. And I guess for this to work properly, there would need to be a way to manage the orientation of the profile along the curve.

[hermit.crab]

The VRayProxy does not have such capabilities, I'm afraid. It may be best to do such adjustments pre-export.

[Dan Andersen]

Converting it to meshes from Houdini based on the correct profile is of course an option, but it's slower, less flexible and the caches will be way larger.

But thanks for confirming it's not currently possible. I'll continue searching for other paths forward.