V-Ray with Massive -- Is there a flag to force texture caching from same file path?

[darloman]

Hey,

I'm currently using the new version of Massive that supports V-Ray and their plugin doesn't seem to cache textures being loaded from the same file path (many agents with the same textures will load duplicate copies into RAM). I am just wondering if there is a global flag in V-Ray that will force it to automatically cache textures that are being loaded from the same file path?

I have already contacted Massive Software, and they're looking into a fix, but I figured if there is some global option (that may work) then I may get a quicker response from here...

Thanks,
Mark

[vlado]

For the moment, there isn't such a flag. This is on the to do list though, and if it is urgent I can bump its priority. The guys at Massive can also fix this on their end too.

Best regards,
Vlado

[darloman]

Hey Vlado,

How long would it take to add if you bump the priority (as in to get it in the nightly builds)? I'm not sure how long Massive Software will take to fix it in their plugin, so if it's a feature that wouldn't take long to add, then I would be totally grateful for it's addition (since another issue with the plugin means I can only use one thread to render so I'm submitting multiple renders per box -- without texture caching, memory usage is insanely high). Oh, and we're running V-Ray 2.0 for Maya.

Thanks,
Mark

[vlado]

I can get it to you by the end of the week, I think... is that ok?

Best regards,
Vlado

[darloman]

Yeah, the end of the week would be awesome .

[joconnell]

How does this work out of curiosity? Does Massive write a single vrmesh file for each frame? Or does it make an animated vrmesh for each person?

[vlado]

I don't think it writes any .vrmesh files; it feeds the data directly to V-Ray.

Best regards,
Vlado

[darloman]

How does this work out of curiosity? Does Massive write a single vrmesh file for each frame? Or does it make an animated vrmesh for each person?

From what I understand/observed, it creates a vrscene file that contains all the agent definitions ("GeomMassiveMesh") that will allow the Massive V-Ray plugin to dynamically generate the agent geometry per frame using cached simulation data (which was cached using Massive). No geometry is specified directly in the vrscene files (or as vrmesh files), as that would become prohibitively large and IO intensive (think of hundreds of thousands of agents). Originally Massive was developed for RenderMan and have only recently ported the code over to V-Ray -- hence the issues (they assumed a few things which turned out not to be true).

[vlado]

So this is done now I think - can you email me to vlado@chaosgroup.com with some more info about which particular build you need (e.g. OS and version).

Best regards,
Vlado

[darloman]

Email sent with the info.

[joconnell]

Ah I see - it's fed directly to the command line renderer itself. How do you control material settings and so on for agents?

[darloman]

You have configuration files that define the agents attributes (geo to load, bones, shaders for each renderer etc...) that are loaded by the Massive plugin in V-Ray. The plugin then applies the shaders for each piece of geo when its dynamically created.