Vray Proxies and Texture Reference Objects for Procedural Shading

[arideout]

Hello,

I have seen a few posts that mention this, but none seemed to be resolved. I was curious if it is possible to use Texture Referencing on Vray Proxies to utilize procedural 3d textures in their shading networks.

For my particular case, I have a rigid body simulation that I have cached out as a vray proxy since it seems to be a much easier to work with solution than having a very heavy maya scene with many objects driven by either curves or an Alembic cache. The shaders I am using for the sim utilize procedural 3d textures since the geometry has either no or very poor uvs. The textures drive colors as well as displacement on chunks, and are very noticeably "swimming" without any sort of texture reference.

I have tried creating a texture reference object off of the proxy's first frame with "show whole mesh" checked and rendering, though this does not work properly. Tried this with the active vray mesh both in proxy display mode and full mesh display mode (in viewport). I was however able to get the texture reference working when using another renderer (Maya Software) by creating the "whole mesh" texture reference object and then leaving the mesh driven by the proxy cache also on "show whole mesh". I assume this works because the proxy cache has a fixed point number. Unfortunately it does not work properly with Vray.

Currently I only need the texture reference thing to work on fixed point number vray proxy caches which seems far easier to achieve than any changing point order/number stuff (know all to well how much of a pain those can be deal with).

vrayformaya v3.10.01
MacOS X 10.10.3

Thanks,
Alex

[vlado]

The way to do it would be to bake the texture coordinates into a color set before exporting the proxy. Then you can specify that color set in the additional V-Ray attributes for a 3D placement node without the need for texture referencing.

Best regards,
Vlado

[arideout]

Hello Vlado,

Thanks for the reply! Would you mind elaborating on how one would go about doing this? I can't say I have done 3d texture coordinate baking and wasn't seeing a native way of doing that unless writing a script would be necessary? Then when baking these coordinates, are they within world space as to retain texture continuity on separate neighboring objects using the same texture? I also wasn't finding color set selecting within the extra attributes on a maya 3d texture placement node. It seemed as though all that was shown was one selecting uv maps.

Thanks
Alex