Level of Detail at render time

[alainfx]

Hello,

I'm wondering if VRay supports some kind of Level of Detail (LOD)

For example, I have this :
-High poly object, shaded with high resolution textures.
-Low poly object, shaded with low resolution textures.

Depending on the distance from the camera to the object, VRay would render this :
-Near : High poly and high resolution textures.
-Medium : a fade between the 2 kind of objects (in that case both levels are rendered and automatically blended).
-Far : Low poly and low resolution textures.

I have used it in some other famous renderer, this feature is a life saver.
Is it possible in VRay ?


Thanks.

[vlado]

The Maya LOD feature should work fine with V-Ray.

Best regards,
Vlado

[alainfx]

The Maya LOD feature should work fine with V-Ray.

Does it handle the fade between 2 levels ? (it avoids the pop-up effect that is seen when current level changes)
Thanks Vlado.

[vlado]

Does it handle the fade between 2 levels ? (it avoids the pop-up effect that is seen when current level changes)

No. There is no plausible way for us to implement this. Stochastic LOD is patented by Pixar, and using transparency will likely mess things up or it might be too slow - we have to make sure that rays started from one of the copies (i.e. shadows, reflections, refractions) only "see" that particular copy and pass through the other copy unaltered, which is not very easy to implement properly.

Best regards,
Vlado

[bigbossfr]

It is not possible to use point cloud for proxy mesh ?
Currently, proxy are loaded entirely ?

[ALFRED_ST_MEDIA]

converting your geo to vray proxy and converting your textures to tiled EXRs (img2tiledexr.exe in the vray bin folder). The vray proxy will load at render time and render quite quickly. If you have a number of these high poly meshes (say, stones and chain links for a castle, and hundreds of thousands of trees on a mechanical map), the proxy is loaded into memory once, then re-used by the vray. very efficient. As for the tiled EXR textures, your texture is converted into a tiled, multi-rez version of your texture, so only the required resolution is loaded into memory a the time of render.

We use this method extensively on the Game of Thrones titles.

[bigbossfr]

converting your geo to vray proxy and converting your textures to tiled EXRs (img2tiledexr.exe in the vray bin folder). The vray proxy will load at render time and render quite quickly. If you have a number of these high poly meshes (say, stones and chain links for a castle, and hundreds of thousands of trees on a mechanical map), the proxy is loaded into memory once, then re-used by the vray. very efficient. As for the tiled EXR textures, your texture is converted into a tiled, multi-rez version of your texture, so only the required resolution is loaded into memory a the time of render.

We use this method extensively on the Game of Thrones titles.

The problem is : if you have a big proxy (like 1Giga), but this proxy is far, and one bucket is on this proxy, the proxy will be loaded entirely (1giga).

[ALFRED_ST_MEDIA]

The problem is : if you have a big proxy (like 1Giga), but this proxy is far, and one bucket is on this proxy, the proxy will be loaded entirely (1giga).

Try using Alembic for this proxy. alembic is very compressed, loading quickly and is pretty well implemented in maya 2013

[alainfx]

The problem is : if you have a big proxy (like 1Giga), but this proxy is far, and one bucket is on this proxy, the proxy will be loaded entirely (1giga).

Try using Alembic for this proxy. alembic is very compressed, loading quickly and is pretty well implemented in maya 2013

Yes Alembic will take less space on disk.
But at render time, once loaded in memory, it will take the original huge size, which is what we want to avoid.