Vray proxy with Speed Tree windy assets

[seandunderdale]

Has anyone tried to proxy an asset from Speed Tree with the wind animation included? Ive got it to work, but the UVs have gone weird on parts of the tree. The proxy file ended being huge...most likely since its making a proxy per frame of animation?...but that seems to work fine. Its just the UVs that go screwy. Speed Tree comes out with a UV / mesh chooser and the geo shape nodes plugged into the shading network...but this is lost when converting to proxy, and the texture looks totally wrong.

[seandunderdale]

Ok, a friend pointed me to the Vray options in the 2d placement node to dial in a UV set index. This seems to do the job and solve the issue, although I didnt think it worked at first since it doesnt update in the viewport, but it works in render.

[Morbid Angel]

Has anyone tried to proxy an asset from Speed Tree with the wind animation included? Ive got it to work, but the UVs have gone weird on parts of the tree. The proxy file ended being huge...most likely since its making a proxy per frame of animation?...but that seems to work fine. Its just the UVs that go screwy. Speed Tree comes out with a UV / mesh chooser and the geo shape nodes plugged into the shading network...but this is lost when converting to proxy, and the texture looks totally wrong.

you should only use fbx in my experience its much better size vise and works with everything. You have to use material it comes with, which embeds shader assignments, its done on per face so its not pretty.

[seandunderdale]

Ive ended up not using proxy. I bring the FBX in from Speed Tree into an asset prep scene, shade up about nine palm trees, all with wind animation cache and shade them up to all match my lighting. I then reference this scene of nine master trees in, and then create standard maya instances of those references. I dont need hundreds, its more like thirty, so doing this manually isnt much of a ball ache. It means I can update my master palm scene if I need to, and everything should pipe downstream. Seems to be working for what I need.

I was surprised how chunky the proxy animation file was versus the fbx animation file though. I do wish there was more greenery for Maya that has animation. Speed Tree seems to be the only option that I can find.

[Morbid Angel]

there is also xfrog which suppose to be as good, but I find speed tree easy and intuitive. For the alembic vs fbx, alembic is a single snapshot of mesh per frame. if you have 1000 frame animation, it means its 1000 unique trees in one file. Fbx is a simple pointcache inside, which is just vertex position in world space, so it compressed verywell and is a lot less.

[Mihail.Djurev]

V-Ray proxy also supports alembics with layers. If you can export the vertex animation in a separate layer and keep the rest static, size will be much smaller I guess. That being said, I don't think Maya's native alembic exporter supports this.