Vray Fur not following mesh

[moxi]

I have a character with a jacket that I am using vray fur on. It looks nifty, if I do say so, but when I apply a cache to the geo upon which the fur is being generated, I get a bit of wierdness:

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Half or more of the vray fur remains at the starting point of my character while the other half follows the jacket geo to wherever it is animated.
I am not certain if this would happen if the fur was generated within the rig file, but I am fairly certain that the results would be similar.
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My process is as such (and it is, at this point automated and scripted but can easily be done outside of that framework):

(1) reference import character with only geo, shaders and vray fur.
(2) apply geo caches (previously generated from animation scene) to referenced character geo
(3) set up appropriate render elements, render layers and set interaction elements
(4) render out scene

Should I be caching out the vray fur and if so, how is that achieved?
Vray fur is a "custom raytraced primitive (it's not triangles, but line segments), right? That would mean that it is cacheable, right?

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Otherwise, and I will test this now, I would think that I could:

(1) reference import character with only geo, shaders and NO vray fur.
(2) apply geo caches (previously generated from animation scene) to referenced character geo
(3) generate vray fur on deformed/cached jacket geo in scene <----
(4) set up appropriate render elements, render layers and set interaction elements
(5) render out scene

I have a hunch that because a deformed geo shape node is created when geo caches are applied that perhaps the connection to the vray fur or how the vray fur determines the area of the mesh it will be on is somehow muddled?

Any thoughts you all have would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

R

[moxi]

A slight update but still not a complete solve.

When applying the fur to a rigged version of the jacket, it follows appropriately.
However, when applying the fur to anything with a cache it does not follow.
I understand why this happens because the fur respects the object's pivot and when a cache is applied the object pivot remains unaffected. Just the vert points are moved in space by the baked information.
I believe that is the dumbed down version of how it operates. Please correct me if I am wrong.

However, what is the best workflow then if I would like to have a lighting scene that is clean of rigs and utlizes caches in order to avoid possible corruption or simply an overly complex lighting scene?
I would like to cache out the vray fur when I am caching out the jacket's geo (the geo upon which I am placing the fur).
Is this possible or is there another workflow to consider.

Any help would be great.

Thanks,

R

[yolov]

Hello moxi,

We were unable to reproduce this issue. What version of V-Ray/Maya are you using and would it be possible to get us some geo files/caches so we can try it out ourselves and hopefully spot the problem.

Thank you in advance!

Best regards,
yolov

[moxi]

sure. I will put a package together tonight or early tomorrow...as work is quite crazy today... and get something out to you.
Thanks for checking on this. much appreciated.

On an aside, is there any way to convert vray fur to geometry in scene so that perhaps I can cache it out like a regular piece of geo and make it work that way?

Thanks.

R

[vlado]

On an aside, is there any way to convert vray fur to geometry in scene so that perhaps I can cache it out like a regular piece of geo and make it work that way?

Not for the moment.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morbid Angel]

Your problem is that when you apply a cache to the referenced mesh, the original mesh is replaced by a new mesh to which the cache is applied, this is done internally by maya when it creates a cache node, so any previous association with the original mesh is no longer relevant. I am not sure what happens with the fur meshes you have, but I suspect this has something to do with it. What I can suggest is to apply an empty cache node to your original model geo inside the model file, and then when you reference it in, just point the cache node to a path, so the model is preserved.

[moxi]

We have been dealing a lot with that as we piece through our caching workflow with deformedGeo nodes and preserving vray attribute connections with a good bit of success. I had not thought of that for this ...duh?...In any case, still have some wierdness so I will try it. Most of the time I just apply the fur to a renderable piece of geometry that is wrap deformed to a cage geo that has a geoCache or other deforms attached and that generally does the trick. Just not in this case...

Either way I will post a scene and update in a week or so...just finishing out a project now.

Thanks for you added ideas, Dmitry.

R