animated proxies

[chips__]

Hey

I have a bunch of objects that i have written out as proxies (done in houdini -> ply->vrmesh). these are then instanced on particles and all is good. rendered close to a trillion polys in 40 minutes (hd, good sampling, gi etc). Now, the client wants the objects to move. I apply a few deformers to the proxies, and the animation works fine on the instanced... untill i render. So it turns out that after i applied the deformer i can only render the faces that are shown in the viewport. The quick fix is to just check showWholeMesh, but that makes the machine extreeemely slow, load times are crazy, and ram is disappearing in front of my eyes. Next up i figured i would write the deformed meshes out as animated proxies. But these turn out to load even slower, and simple things like scrubbing are next to impossible?

Does anyone have a good solution to my problem? After switching to animated proxies my rendertimes increased from 40->90 minutes, just because of the load time, and when using showwholemesh, which i guess is converting the vrmesh to maya, it was at around 60 minutes... pretty please... anyone?

Peter
Ghost

[vlado]

The correct way would be to write the deformed meshes as proxies. As for the scrubbing, there is a caching mechanism in place for the viewports (depending on which version of V-Ray for Maya you are using). You could also try to display the proxies as bounding boxes.

You could also try regular meshes (not proxies) but set the "default geometry" option in the V-Ray settings to "Dynamic". It will do something like proxies internally but without saving/loading them from disk.

Best regards,
Vlado

[chips__]

ok, sounds like i'm doing it right then... thats what i ended up doing. But the load times are killing me right now i've tried on 2.2 on maya 2012 and 2.0 on maya 2011

[vlado]

You could also try regular meshes (not proxies) but set the "default geometry" option in the V-Ray settings to "Dynamic". It will do something like proxies internally but without saving/loading them from disk.

Best regards,
Vlado