Displacement to vray proxy

[7enith]

Hello Vladimir,

a while ago you created a handy script that converts geo to vray proxy before loading and I can't tell you enough of how useful that little function is! Especially with Zbrush!


Building up on that idea with converting displacements to proxy's might be very useful as well

Often hero assets require a lot of detail and therefore a lot of time for displacements to be calculated. By offloading them to a vray proxy when the Asset is done with texturing might be very efficient. But if the resulting 30 Million object hits your viewport it will be a test for patience.

Is it possible to create a script that can take the settings of vray's displacement (maybe with udims) and converts it to a very high polygon proxy ready to use, again bypassing the viewport? It would be ideal for a Photoshop or Mari to vray displacement workflow.

All the best
Christian V.

[^Lele^]

Besides the point of the question, notice in V-Ray displacement is always treated as dynamic geometry, identical to the way proxies behave, unless instructed differently (i'm not at all sure how the defaults are in Modo).

As for its speed, what kind of "long time" are you experiencing?
I was testing it the other week on Digital Emily, and as a new rig stress test i kicked it in the nads, subdividing the base mesh enough to insure i caught all the detail the 16k map contained (i don't quite recall the amount, but i believe it was 16 times. so 4^16 times the base mesh polys.)
To fill 30gb of ram with displaced polygons took little more than 10 seconds, albeit in max, on a stock i7-6800k, with the displacement set to static...

[7enith]

Hello Lela,

thanks for your quick answer! In that case I was thinking more on an exterior usage case with larger values, like many many rocks, snow, Ground Pebbles and so on. I have to admit that I´m not THAT experienced with vray, but its habit of mine to convert displaced objects to proxy´s to bypass the tesselation process.

Currently I´m working on an environment scene, maybe I need to check it out some more! I´ll keep you updated!

All the best
Christian V.

[^Lele^]

Eheh, i can only speak of general V-Ray properties, as well: i know very very little of Modo, you wouldn't likely want to give me a scene to debug for you... ^^
So by all means, experiment and report, that i may learn a thing or two (thousand) as well.

[7enith]

No problem, I´ll give you the scene once everything is in place I´m really exited in checking this out!

[vladimir.nedev]

I think Andrei ( the V-Ray for Blended developer) was doing some work to make it possible to bake the dynamic V-Ray displacement/sub-division and store it in a .vrmesh file.
Not sure if this was finished.

This is not as trivial a change as calling the ply2vrmesh command to create a .vrmesh from a .obj file (for example).

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[Angus Hume]

Did anything come of this?