Vray proxies - should it be taking so long to load my scenes?

[Richard7666]

I have a scene with approximately 13,000 instances of a V-ray proxy of a small patch of low-poly grass. The scene itself weighs in at 57MB (contains a house and car model). When I try and load this scene, it basically hangs Maya. I waited 5 minutes then ctrl+alt+deleted out of it as I figured it had locked up. I have 16GB of RAM.

These proxies were instanced using the scatter tool found in Ninja Dojo, though the same thing happens if I try instancing them with icPolyScatter or LayoutTools. Whereas if I use particle-based instancing, everything is very quick. However as I'm not much of a scripter, controlling the distribution of my grass patches with particles is a bit hard for me, so using an option that individually instances each proxy is preferable (such as the tools I mentioned). The issue also happens if I simply instance the geometry without converting it to a proxy.

Why doesn't the problem occur when I use particles to do the instancing though?

Any ideas on how to get around this issue would be great

[vlado]

Are the resulting objects really instances, or actual copies? Can you post the scene or send it us for inspection? I guess the problem is that the proxy object attempts to access the .vrmesh file to determine the number of shaders and the preview for the viewports. However if they are instances, this is supposed to happen just once, rather than for each instance.

In any case, for recent nightly builds, we added an option for the proxies to never access the file again except for rendering. This seems to help in proxy-heavy scenes.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Richard7666]

thanks for your reply Vlado,

They are instances; each of the tools I tried has an 'instance' option in addition to 'copy'. (and also changing to say, bounding box display on one of the proxies changes the display for all of them, so the instancing definitely worked properly)

I will clean the house and materials out of the scene and send a copy of the scene + the vrmesh sometime tomorrow.

[snivlem]

Hey Richard,

Are you running out of RAM when rendering? Just curious as I think I had a similar issue with 10's of thousands of proxies.

[Richard7666]

I can render with average RAM utilisation, however RAM use goes through the roof during the scattering process itself and (if I recall correctly) during opening the scene in Maya.

I'm only using 13,000 proxies though, not tens of thousands (though maybe you had less complex proxies or more RAM? Though mine are only low poly grass clumps, so not exactly big complex trees or anything)

[tashko.zashev]

Hi Richard,

You can send us your scene to: support@chaosgroup.com
So we can try to reproduce this issue in our environment.