referencing, instancing, and proxies

[shadevfx]

Hello Vrayers.... We have a project where we have several assets that are vray proxies. These exist inside of individual maya files that are then referenced into a master scene. These are then to be instanced a few hundred times to create a large field of these assets.

We are having trouble on several fronts.

First, if we instance the referenced vray proxies, they break randomly... basically we lose shader connectivity to some but not all of the instances. This, doesn't happen if we import the vray proxy into the scene however. So it seems to be related to references.

However, this is a problem, because if we update the shaders on the asset downstream, and it isn't referenced, there isn't an easy way to propagate the new shaders throughout the scene.

Our next step was to just re-connect new shaders to the vray proxies that have been imported, but that seems buggy as well. If we connect new shaders to the shader slots of the vray proxies we lose shaders on many of the instances as well.

Are we approaching this the wrong way? Or is this a known bug?

It just seems that if the shaders arent stored in the .vrmesh file, and rather the maya file that points to the vrmesh, we should be able to reliably updated the shaders that are connected to them.

Please share any insight you might have to this methodology.

Thanks,
Bryan

[vlado]

We had some problems with the way shaders for proxies were handled in the original release (as dynamic attributes); we've reworked this in the latest nightly builds so it should work better in your case.

Best regards,
Vlado

[vladimir.nedev]

There was a bug with VRayMesh nodes that are referenced, the Attribute editor wouldn't show any shaders, although they are still connected to the VRayMesh node. And you would have to remake any connections using the Hypergraph (since you cannot see the slots in the interface, the old connections were preserved though). This is fixed now.

For the other problems, the random shader disconnections, I have never been able to actually reproduce them. Can you give me some more specific instructions how to do so, may be send me example scenes. My e-mail is
vladimir.nedev [at] chaosgroup [dot] com.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[shadevfx]

There was a bug with VRayMesh nodes that are referenced, the Attribute editor wouldn't show any shaders, although they are still connected to the VRayMesh node. And you would have to remake any connections using the Hypergraph (since you cannot see the slots in the interface, the old connections were preserved though). This is fixed now.

For the other problems, the random shader disconnections, I have never been able to actually reproduce them. Can you give me some more specific instructions how to do so, may be send me example scenes. My e-mail is
vladimir.nedev [at] chaosgroup [dot] com.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

Is it possible to get an updated build? Would love to see if it solves our problem.

Thanks
Bryan

[vladimir.nedev]

You can send an e-mail to Vlado for access to the nightly builds.
His e-mail is
vlado [at] chaosgroup [dot] com

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev