XGen and Vrscene

[Algehov]

First I just wanna say the the new vrscene function for xgen is absolutely brilliant and great!
We're slicing up our still renders for multiple computers to render it, and this addition to xgen results in my slices rendering in 10 mintutes instead of 40! So its a huuuge time saver whenever im happy with the look of my groom.

But im just curious. Do I have to reexport the vrscene whenever im moving the geometry its linked to? It looks like if I reexport patches for batch render after I moved my object, my fur still renders at the place the vrscene was created originially. Can this be hooked up to follow the transform of the alembic file instead? Having to tweak the position afterwards without having to export a new vrscene thats 2-3gb big would be great, as that is something we do often whenever we tweak the camera/composition.
Or perhaps im doing something wrong, and this is already how its suppose to work.

I also wanna take the time to ask; If I wanna export my whole groom and source object as a vrcene, to be used in the vrscene manager. Do I have to do that again, or can I use the already exported file within Xgen? I cant get this to work with the vrscene manager.
The reason I wanna do this, is to get away from the whole xgen part and look at it more as an completed asset, that I can import as a "proxy". And instance/duplicate around. How would I go about doing this?


Thanks in advance,
Simon

[moshev]

For the first part, the answer is unfortunately yes, for now. The vrscene cache isn't automatically regenerated when you modify the source object. Also, you don't need to export patches for batch render when using a vrscene cache - it contains the generated fur and doesn't call xgen at all, which is why it needs to be regenerated when the source changes.

For the second, it should be working already as you describe, i.e. you should be able to import the vrscene exported from the XGen window with "export vrscene cache". What issues are you having with that?

[Algehov]

Alright, good to know for the first question, thanks.
About the second one. I seems to only get an empty imported vrscene (just the transformnode) when I choose to import the vrscene created from the xgen window (this is with groomable splines btw, not achieves). Both when I try the geometry-specific vrscene created which is big, and just the "standard" one which is small. And they dont render anything.

Im talking about importing it thought vray scene manager btw, not the xgen window. It works good in the xgen window.
But if I manually export a vrscene of the xgen though Render Settings (baking shaders and everything in with it), that works great. And I can import it through the vray scene manager and it renders blazingly fast! And I can move it around. So thats brilliant. A shame I cant tweak the shader, but I can live with that

Is there a cap on how big a vrscene can be? I sadly have to lower my density of a fairly dense carpet for example for it to successfully export. It looks like if the file will be over 3gb or something it wont work? Is that correct, or is there something else that might be wrong? I didnt notice me running low or RAM, so I dont think that thats the reason. And I can render the scene with higher density, but I will have to wait for the huge xgen translation of the geometry ofcourse.


Thanks in advance agan

[moshev]

Ok, I see what's happening with the vray scene manager. You need to check "Export material for hair" in the XGen options when exporting the cache, because otherwise only geometry is exported and the vrscene manager expects the material to be set on the node in the vrscene. Note that that will only export the hair geometry and not the source geometry. It was really meant to just cache the geometry of the hair and allow you to edit the other parts of the scene. If you want to export both the source geometry and hair together, you need to use the usual vrscene export.

There should be no limit to the size of a vrscene per se, but it will fail to render and export if you have more than several hundred million strands in a single hair geometry. If it does render, but fails to export, then you're not running into that limit. If that's the case, I'll be thankful if you can provide us with an example scene.