ply2vrmesh discard velocity

[Dan Andersen]

Hello,

Is there any way to prune velocity sets when converting abc-->vrmesh with ply2vrmesh? I have some heavy animated assets that I would like to optimize + we don't need to render with motion blur, so any tips for stripping out unnecessary data are welcome.

Cheers,
Dan

[Svetlozar Draganov]

This is not possible currently but we could add a support for it.
The velocity information however wouldn't occupy much RAM so removing it alone wouldn't be a great optimization, how many other channels there are in the .abc file?

Would you please also explain how exactly you would like that feature to operate?
It would be very helpful if you could provide an example .abc file along detailed instructions what exactly you would like to do when converting it to .vrmesh file..

[Dan Andersen]

Yes, I didn't expect it to use less RAM on rendering - just trying to keep the files as small as possible. Filling up the terabytes quite fast, so would be nice to be able to remove the data we don't need.

Heres what -info returns on a random vrmesh frame:

Number of voxels: 18
Reading voxels... done
Total number of triangles: 2,647,137
Preview triangles: 4001
Channels:
Vertices
Faces
Vertex velocity
Vertex normals
Normals faces
Face info
Maya info channel (data is valid)
Number of texture channels: 2
Texture channels list: 0 - 'uvmap1', 1 - 'velocity'
Bounding box: [-13.578, -0.175, -10.550] - [16.739, 27.256, 16.642]
UV sets: 1 ('uvmap1')
Color sets: 1 ('velocity')
Shader sets: 4 ('a_shd', 'b_shd', 'c_shd', 'd_shd')

As for how it should be implemented, I'm not exactly sure. Is there any way to pass a list to a command line flag? Or support multi-use of the same flag? So something like this could work?

list arg:

ply2vrmesh "file.abc" -excludeChannel ["velocity", "map2"]

multi arg:

ply2vrmesh "file.abc" -excludeChannel "velocity" -excludeChannel "map2"

I can try and get you an abc if you are interested in implementing it.

[Dan Andersen]

.. Any thoughts on this?

[vlado]

We can probably do something like this, but I don't know the time frame for it yet. How urgently do you need it?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Dan Andersen]

It is functionality we could benefit from fairly often on shows in general, and it would be very handy for the project we're working on right now, but it's not crucial.