Working with Maya Scene Assembly and proxies

[Fredrik Averpil]

Hi,

I've created a little tool here which creates an assemblyDefinition node where we can choose to represent an object as either gpucache or a vrmesh (among other things). Of course, on render-time we want these to always be set to the vrmesh one since gpucache won't render at all in V-Ray.

I know that with Maya Software you can set in render globals that the definition of a certain description (such as "vrmesh" or a regex) will be automatically be set on render-time. Is there any way to achieve this with V-Ray today or would it be possible to implement something similar? (see screenshot from Maya Software render globals below)



Please note:
- We are on one of the latest nightlies of V-Ray for Maya 2015
- We do not only switch between gpucache and vrmesh, we also have a number of other representations - but we will always want to switch to the vrmesh one during rendering

Cheers!

[Fredrik Averpil]

Hm... also, it seems that the Maya assemblyDefinition is somehow reset when rendering with V-Ray automatically, so that no representation is shown when rendering. Or am I doing something wrong?
Basically, wherever I have an assemblyDefinition, this won't render and I can see it disappears from the scene during rendering in the VFB.

[ivaylo.ivanov]

For start, we must fix the alembic rendering. It seems that Maya creates a gpuCache node, which is actually supported, but we don't recognize the assemblyDefinition as a transformation node, and nothing is rendered. It should be easy to fix. We don't support current this Scene Assembly tab. Must look into it after we fix the alembic rendering.

[Fredrik Averpil]

That would be excellent. I'd love to know whenever there's progress on this. We are dying to start using this.

[ivaylo.ivanov]

Actually the alembic file works fine, it doesn't render because it doesn't have material by default. This isn't stopping only Mental Ray it seems. We must see how to support these Render Settings options...

[ivaylo.ivanov]

Mental Ray seems to support the built-in alembic material. AFAIK it's very very basic, but it maybe this is the reason Maya doesn't assing default material.

[Fredrik Averpil]

Also, one of our scene representations point to a Maya Ascii file. In this Maya Ascii file, there is a vray proxy node. This vray proxy node points to an alembic file (not a vrmesh file).

This is the representation we wish to be auto-selected for all assemblyDefinition nodes in the scene when hitting render.

This means that for us, we are waiting for some way of automatically getting this specific scene representation to be auto-selected on render-time. We also create a cache representation which we point directly at the .abc file, but we do not intend to render this.