Maintaining (and accessing) the scene structure of a V-Ray proxy file

[Fredrik Averpil]

Hi,

Would it somehow be possible to expose the scene structure of a V-Ray proxy?
For example, if you need to hide a certain group within a vrmesh you cannot do that right now, as far as I know. The workaround is to set a transparent shader for all shaders that belong to the objects you wish to hide. But if the same shader is used somewhere else, this object will disappear too... Also, sometimes you may want to move an object within the V-Ray proxy, but this I believe is not at all possible.

A crazy idea; would it be possible to keep the fantastic memory performance of rendering V-Ray proxies, but also maintain scene structure and possibly allow modification to the mesh if you could feed an alembic file into the vrmesh node?

[Fredrik Averpil]

Hm. Or is alembic natively supported by v-Ray, and could work as a substitute to v-ray proxies (memory wise, I mean)?

[vlado]

Would it somehow be possible to expose the scene structure of a V-Ray proxy?
For example, if you need to hide a certain group within a vrmesh you cannot do that right now, as far as I know.

Yes, it is possible - we have had the visibility lists for some time now.

Also, sometimes you may want to move an object within the V-Ray proxy, but this I believe is not at all possible.

No, it's not possible right now.

A crazy idea; would it be possible to keep the fantastic memory performance of rendering V-Ray proxies, but also maintain scene structure and possibly allow modification to the mesh if you could feed an alembic file into the vrmesh node?

You *can* feed an Alembic file into a V-Ray proxy node, which will give you some of the performance benefits, though .vrmesh files tend to be a bit faster to work with and are perhaps a bit more memory efficient.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Fredrik Averpil]

[strikethrough]At render time, is there a (performance) difference between using an alembic file "as-is" in Maya vs feeding it into a V-Ray proxy node?[/strikethrough]

Edit: Uhhh...! Never mind

[Fredrik Averpil]

You *can* feed an Alembic file into a V-Ray proxy node, which will give you some of the performance benefits, though .vrmesh files tend to be a bit faster to work with and are perhaps a bit more memory efficient.

Ohhh, this is awesome!