Animated alembic?

[Lenscowboy]

Hi Guys,

I'm trying to render an animated alembic mesh but vray in modo only renders the first frame of mesh for every frame of the animation. Is there an animation setting somewhere to enable the mesh to be read every frame?
Or is this not possible in vray modo yet?
Perhaps a way to render out separate frames individually?

Thanks

Brad

[vladimir.nedev]

How do you have the Alembic file loaded - imported in MODO directly or through a V-Ray Proxy item ?
If you could send me the scene and alembic file to vladimir.nedev [at] chaosgroup.com I can take a look and see what's wrong.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[Lenscowboy]

Wow perfect! I didn't even know about vray proxies. Thanks Vladimir.
Now how do I apply a vray material to it?

[Lenscowboy]

ok I get it. Export as proxy and the shader is automatically attached. Just one more thing: when I bring the export in again via a vray proxy item there is no preview. I am only able to view the bounding box or the render geometry.
How do I enable preview geometry?

[vladimir.nedev]

I would still like us to figure out why it didn't work when not using a V-Ray proxy. Did that animated alembic file work in MODO's own renderer/preview ?
By default MODO imports only one frame of Alembic files, you need to explicitly tell it to load all frames. Maybe that was the problem ?

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[vladimir.nedev]

Wow perfect! I didn't even know about vray proxies. Thanks Vladimir.
Now how do I apply a vray material to it?

If you use an alembic file directly in the V-Ray Proxy item (instead of converting to .vrmesh format first), the group mask's "'Polygon Tag" will list all separate objects in the alembic file as material tags.
The list can get very long for complex alembic files though. So if you want to apply materials to separate polygons, it's probably best to import the alembic in MODO, apply the materials, and
export to .vrmesh like you did.
If you don't want materials on specific polygons, you can use a "group mask" in item mode. Just right click on the V-Ray proxy item with the alembic file, and choose "Create Item Mask".
Then you don't have to deal with the potentially long list of material tags.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[vladimir.nedev]

Just one more thing: when I bring the export in again via a vray proxy item there is no preview. I am only able to view the bounding box or the render geometry.
How do I enable preview geometry?

Which V-Ray for MODO build number are you using ? We had a bug like that in 3.00.05, it affected materials as well.
Also, if the original MODO mesh has subdivision polygons, the preview voxel is its subdivision cage, and it looks pretty good.
But if it doesn't have subdivision polygons, the preview voxel is a random subset of the mesh's polygons, which might
not be clearly visible.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

edit : the bug was in 3.00.05, not in 3.00.06

[Lenscowboy]

thanks for all the info Vladimir. That clears up a lot for me.
I am not using the latest build yet. I was in the middle of a project so want to finish that before I upgrade. I'm sure this will resolve the preview issue once I update the plugin.
Re the native animated alembic, yes it worked fine as a plain import and rendered fine in modo's renderer as well. The only thing that didn't animate was the render (though the 'render animation in vray' menu item.)
Of course the vray proxy offers a much faster preview so I will definitely be using that. I will send you scene with the imported alembic shortly.
Thanks for all the help.