Vray Proxy - "show whole mesh" slow as hell

[ultrasonic]

Hey Guys,

do you see any chance to speed up reading the whole mesh in the VrayMesh Node?

I have my proxies on the local harddrive and it takes ages to load them. My 5 vrmesh files are only 58 megabytes but take about 10 minutes to load!

any ideas?

thx as always
Oli

[vladimir.nedev]

It seems the Maya API function we use to set the mesh normals is very slow. I am not seeing an alternative to it though. The only thing I can think of right now is to add an option whether the normals from the proxy file should be set in the Maya mesh, or we should let Maya compute the normals as it wishes. Not setting the normals speeds up the "show whole mesh" considerably. I'll ask the guys at Autodesk whether there is a faster way to set the normals, but from what I am seeing in the help, there isn't.

When we don't set the normals, Maya will average the polygon normals for each vertex, from what I see. This should be fine for smooth meshes. Any hard edges in the original mesh will show wrong ( like the edges of a cube, for example)

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[ultrasonic]

Hey Vladimir,

thanks for this quick reply....now i understand whats going on...

I know that there are already a lot of options in the proxy and i think it is not the best solution,but could you maybe add another option like "Fast preview" or an enum "preview mode" with "accurate" and "fast" option. Only until u get help from autodesk?

thx
Oliver

[vladimir.nedev]

I've added a new check box under "Show whole mesh", it is called "Don't set normals". It defaults to off and has effect only when "Show whole mesh" is checked. You should check "Don't set normals" before checking "Show whole mesh", so the first load isn't slow.
You can try this with tomorrow's nightly build.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[ultrasonic]

Geat news!!!! thx a lot!

cheers
Oliver