Proxy Viewport Perfomance

[CAPTURE_MM]

Hi,
we are using (non-animated) proxies a lot within our animated scenes.

Concerning the VRayMesh's "Cache geometry" feature and the viewport performance in Maya:
If I load up a scene with proxies without having the Cache geometry feature on, the playback performance is bad and there is some related network traffic. Turning on the Caching fixes that, as expected. But it is still a lot worse than deleting the VRayMesh-Nodes and playback with the remaining geometry (which is identical). Also the profiler tells me, that the VRayMesh-Nodes are doing something time consuming.

In addition to that, we feel it has become slower than before ("before" might mean VRay 2 maybe, we are not sure...).

Besides, is there an option to flush the cached proxy geometry from memory (appart from reloading the scene...)? Since we need all our machines memory for a preview rendering, we like to disable the caching. Otherwise, no rendering is possible.

So what is a good workflow to work with proxies in the viewport?

Does the Cache geometry option has influence on the memory consumption of the scene in batch rendering?

Thanks and kind regards,
Janosch

Maya 2015 Ext 1 + SP5
VRay Build 25803

[vlado]

To clear the proxy geometry cache, go to the VRay tab of the render settings, Global options - Advanced section, and click on the "Clear V-Ray proxies preview cache" button. I don't think the preview is much slower than before, but we haven't done any timings for newer Maya versions. Can you provide a scene that is causing a problem for you?

In any case, the current approach (creating a Maya mesh object for the viewport preview) is very slow to recreate the mesh for each frame, so there are limits to how fast this can be. Which is why we are looking to implement a preview like the GPU cache in Maya.

Best regards,
Vlado

[CAPTURE_MM]

Thanks for your quick answere. The preview-feature sounds nice. We're looking forward to it!

I probably edited my post while you were writing with this question:
Does the Cache geometry option has influence on the memory consumption of the scene in batch rendering? We thought it has, but never tested it.
Regards,
Janosch

[ivaylo.ivanov]

The cache is automatically disabled in batch mode.

[obrad1972]

Guys do you know if this is implemented in Vray proxy file?

I'll like to connect GPU cache as view port preview mesh.

Thanks
Obrad

[ivaylo.ivanov]

There is nothing to connect. The GPU cache is just a Maya node that directly draws abc files, instead of creating an actual mesh. So we can't really send it a mesh to draw for example. We've implemented a similar thing in the nightly builds, but it has nothing to do with the Maya node, it's just a preview option in the proxy itself. Will be included in the next SP.