vrayscenegeometry dropping out

[monsteradurm]

I am using a bunch of vrayscenegeometry nodes with material overrides attach to render a scene. The issue that i am having is that for no reason I can see different nodes have their "filtering" drop out. So on frame 1, the selectedrop down for "hair_meshShape" will work, but on the next frame it will not - when rendering in sequence.

Ive tried rendering each vrscene frame separately, and combining them all without any luck.

Is there a more efficient way to select geometry in the vr scene and apply the material overrides?

[Christophe.Cot]

There is no apparent reason the drop down would auto-reset itself even in the case of an animation.
I made a simple example here and it behaves as expected.
Can you share your vrscene and Nuke setup (or at least the VRaySceneGeometry setup) ?
You can either pm me or send via email directly at christophe.cot@chaosgroup.com

[monsteradurm]

Ive managed to pinpoint the issue a bit more so I will provide some clarification and reasoning behind what I am trying to do.

I am using a sequence of VRScene files for every asset across a bunch of scenes. Each asset, for example the main character, has the same geometry nodes

Ive made a group with these scene geometry nodes and created a scripted button hooked up to a filepath that will change the path of each vrscenegeometry node. It simply changes the path of each and then executes the reload button on each vrscenegeometry.

It is after the path is changed (from one scene to the next) that they start playing up.

Im using the filter parameter to automatically select the correct geometry piece - eg. *hair* - which is consistent between scenes.

[Christophe.Cot]

Normally if you have a valid scene, it is impossible that the VRScene asset knob shows "None". The only case where this should happen is if you (re)load a scene in which you have no VRaySceneAsset plugin and the "filter all assets" knob is unchecked.
Executing the Reload button should also not be required as the knob change of the filepath triggers some check if the filepath has changed and automatically reload the file if necessary. The reload is mostly there to force a reload in case of indirect file change such as if an included vrscene is used in the vrscene attached as filepath.
What is the format of the filepath ?
If you manage to make it work using the filter param it's ok but still something does not look normal here.

However if I understand correctly, you have an animated object in a bunch of vrscene so you manually set the correct filepath for each frame.
Why don't you export the entire animation in the vrscene instead of doing per-frame vrscene ?
The VRayScene node family can handle animated vrscene without problem and surely it is more efficient this way.

[monsteradurm]

To clarify, we rendered the animation out as EXRs on the farm for each frame, and each frame with a corresponding VRScene - this is an automated process. Im loading the VRScenes as sequences with the frame padding etc the matches the EXR.

I agree it is more efficient to load the entire sequence as a single frame and probably I will just duplicate the renderlayer and override the render settings to set it up this way. I havent rendered vrscenes over deadline this way so may take a bit of investigation. Regardless the sequence/single vrscene file was irrespective of the issue, as it occurred using both types.

It would be super handy if at some stage we could have a means of ignoring individual geometry at the vrscene level.

eg. to have the VRScene load all geometry contained in the file except for the characters eyes, and then have the eyes as a separate VRsceneGeometry where its shader can be overridden - all within nuke. unless this is possible already?

[Christophe.Cot]

To answer your question, while there is no exclude list available in the VRayVRScene node (or the VRaySceneAsset node family) you can use the override snippet at this point if you want modify a single element.
For example, if you want to load the entire vrscene but make some of the Node plugin invisible, you can set something like this in the override snippet knob (the use runtime override must be checked to enable the knob):
Node <*plugin_basename_to_hide*> {
visible=0;
}
Assuming the scene I provided you on the other thread where I have Sphere1, Sphere2 and Sphere3, if I want to hide Sphere2 only then I would write Node <*sphere2*>.
You can add more than one Node override if you need.

[monsteradurm]

Thankyou. This is very helpful. Could this be extended to a name based (prefix/suffix) selection

[Christophe.Cot]

Do you mean Node<prefix*> or Node<*suffix> ? If yes that works too already. In my example I simply put the wildcard to match whatever contains the filtered name.