Imported VRayScene time offsetting doesn't work as expected.

[colorbleed]

Hey,

We're looking into rendering some huge scenes with many instanced characters that have a Yeti hair solution. Since the yeti nodes don't seem to be having some nice "loop" or "offsetting" of loading the caches we were thinking of exporting VRayScenes (e.g. 16 frames) and importing those to the locations of the characters with their respective time offsets. When set to loop it seems to just stay static after the end frame instead of looping.

Unfortunately it seems the "loop" setting on the VRayScene doesn't seem to work (though Ping-pong seems to be doing something). We tried this on something as simple as an animated cube as well. Are we trying to do this the wrong way?

Would anyone know any other techniques to optimizes this for rendering and get our crazy amount of characters rendered with some hair on their heads.

The hair is currently done with Peregrine Yeti.

Cheers,
Colorbleed

[yolov]

It works fine in my tests. The only tricky part is that there seems to be no way for the VRayScene node to read the length of the animation and set the "Anim Length" parameter accordingly.
If you know the exact number of frames of your animation length and set it for "Anim Length", will it help?

[colorbleed]

It did seem to update in the viewport (if "cached" in VRay Scene Manager with those start frames, otherwise its static in view) yet it didn't seem to render the result.
Tested in Maya 2016 Ext. 1 SP6 with V-Ray nightly build: V-Ray for Maya version 3.45.01, revision 26857 from Jul 13 2016, 05:09:38.

[yolov]

You are correct, at some point while rendering the animation it stops looping (around the time it has to start looping).
I'll log it as a bug and I'll keep you posted on the progress.

[yolov]

This is now fixed in the nightly builds (26909 from 20 Aug and later).
It would be great if you could give it a try and report back if it's still not working properly.

[RichardBlank]

Is it possible to set the anim offset to minus? Let's say I have an animated sphere animated from frame 1-20 and I want the animation to start at frame 40 with the animation type to Once? Can't find a workaround for this and I really need to get it to work...

[RichardBlank]

Found a solution for it. Had to set a key in the animation offset and then set the key to minus.

[vlado]

Glad that it's working now - let us know if there is anything else.

Best regards,
Vlado

[RichardBlank]

Yes, it would nice if one could manually drag the slider or at least be able to typ negative values in the animation offset without setting a keyframe.