V-Ray 5 for Rhino - Proxy

[maruyama.edson]

Greetings!

I was checking the docs for the new V-Ray 5 for 3dsMax, and, among other features, one grabbed my attention as a Rhino user.
The docs says the new VrayProxy can carry particles from other DCCs. Will (or can) this be implemented in V-Ray for Rhino, since Rhino doesn't have an internal particle system (as far as I know)?

Any news on when Rhino will get the 5 treatment?

Thanks!

[konstantin_chaos]

Hi Edson Maruyama,

The V-Ray Proxy mesh loader in Rhino does support particles even now.
In order to utilize this functionality you have to do the following:
- Export your particle system form another application as an alembic/abc file
- Load the .abc file as a V-Ray Proxy Mesh

Unfortunately you don't have direct access to the particle appearance parameters in the UI.
If you want to change them, it can be done with a script.
Let me know if you need more details.

Konstantin

[maruyama.edson]

Interesting!
I recently tried to bring an .abc file from Blender with animated grass blades as a particle system (made with Graswald) and it crashed. Is this different than other particles like smoke or water?. Thought it was because it wasn't supported, but maybe I'll try again!
In this case, setting a material for the particles works just like any other proxy? Or is it what you meant by "particle appearance" ?

[konstantin_chaos]

Hi,

Can you please share the abc file causing the crash?
There might be something in the alembic file that we don't fully support.

Besides that, the alembic file stores only the particle positions and not their visual style form the source application.
This means that the fact that something was originally used as smoke or a water particle will not translate to the .abc.
The particles are just points at the end.
V-Ray can render them in two modes - points or spheres.
But as I mentioned you don't see these parameters in the UI (you'll need a scrpt to change them).

Another thing to note is that alembic caches with only particles in them will not be loaded correctly - they disappear on load.
The reason for this is - V-Ray can't show any preview for them.
There are two ways to work around that:
1. Make sure a mesh is also included in the alembic (a simple cube will suffice).
2. Load another proxy and set its preview to custom. Set the file path to to the particles alembic.

To assign a material to the particles just make sure that the proxy Materials toggle is disabled and apply the material to the proxy object directly.

Konstantin