vrmesh vs alembic

[rgbaz]

Howdy,

I am looking to speed up my renders and looking into using VrayProxy and/or abc and have a few questions:

1) Do either of these speed up renders?

2) Which one is faster?

3) Cant figure out whether to use "one voxel per mesh" or not.

4) Performance wise, how does "Faces per voxel" work; more faces per voxel faster or slower?

5) what is the syntax call in "Post Translate Python Script" to add vrscenes or vrmeshes?

Thanks,

[sharktacos]

I don't think either speeds up renders.

The purpose of a proxy is to be able to load massive amounts of data which would otherwise slow down or crash Maya. The purpose of Alembic is a non-linear pipeline. Instead of an animator giving their Maya file to a lighter, they export the animation to Alembic for the lighter.

[rgbaz]

Thanks for clarifying,

I had read somewhere that either of these two formats performed better than standard maya geo (..something about voxelized geo with preset memory address allocations !?)

So I gather that the only speed optimization is that one saves the time translating Maya's geo into vrmesh, by doing it once instead of on a per frame basis at the farm (plus bieng able to work with huge datasets).

[vlado]

1) Do either of these speed up renders?

No. They are designed to bring in geometry at render time which helps with memory management.

2) Which one is faster?

.vrmesh files are typically faster to work with.

3) Cant figure out whether to use "one voxel per mesh" or not.

If you want more speed, turn it on. If you want finer grained memory management or you don't care, keep it off.

4) Performance wise, how does "Faces per voxel" work; more faces per voxel faster or slower?

Same as above; more faces generally means faster renders, but memory is managed in bigger chunks. Generally you don't need to worry about this too much.

5) what is the syntax call in "Post Translate Python Script" to add vrscenes or vrmeshes?

You can find more information and examples here:
http://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/V...d+V-Ray+Scene#

Let us know if you have other questions.

Best regards,
Vlado

[sharktacos]

So I gather that the only speed optimization is that one saves the time translating Maya's geo into vrmesh, by doing it once instead of on a per frame basis at the farm (plus bieng able to work with huge datasets).

In addition to what Vlado said, let me add that using Proxies with large geo can dramatically speed up the time it takes to Save a Maya scene. If it takes an hour to save, and this drops down to a matter of seconds with proxies, that's quite significant for an artist's time.