ply2vrmesh on linux

[vlado]

The proxies were not really meant to be a universal way for transporting geometry data between applications; they are just a way to render efficiently a lot of polygons coming from various sources.

I'm hoping that alembic will take care of the geometry exchange thing too.

Best regards,
Vlado

[bhenriksson]

The proxies were not really meant to be a universal way for transporting geometry data between applications; they are just a way to render efficiently a lot of polygons coming from various sources.

I see, thanks for clearing that.

[ultrasonic]

I also think that alembic will be the way to go for exchange...once u have your mesh in maya with additional point attributes you can store the inside vertex colors (if they aren't already) and use them for shading...those vertex colors can also be stored inside vray proxies...

[bhenriksson]

I'm sure Alembic will take us a long way but I'm still worried about velocity vectors for motion blur and custom attributes for shading. I reckon it will be up to vray to integrate alembic properly rather then getting the data from a maya importer as mayas meshes. It would be interesting to know if such importer might be under consideration?

And to be fair, this should probably be seen as a Maya issue rather then a vray limitation. Would autodesk have opened up their data handling more we would have solved all data shuffling a long time ago. But as that's not likely to change I guess we have to work around them.

[vlado]

I reckon it will be up to vray to integrate alembic properly rather then getting the data from a maya importer as mayas meshes. It would be interesting to know if such importer might be under consideration?

It's not ruled out and we are trying to figure out if it is worth the effort. Proper support for a geometry format (and managing yet another piece of foreign code) is quite a bit of work, and if we can avoid it and get all the data from Maya, then I'd be happier. If not, then work it is But even if we do it, it still won't be quite the same as .vrmesh files.

Best regards,
Vlado

[bhenriksson]

That all makes sense to me. Cheers.