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I was really excited when I have seen in one of the youtube webinars the use of pre-animated assets (trees moving in the wind) and it motivated me to try out the new version of Vray. I think that animated objects make the animation of an architectural project much more interesting, it looks weird when the grass or trees are still.
The use of pre-animated assets is advertised as " Easily add pre-animated 3D objects with animated V-Ray proxies." I have been trying to use them for the last couple of days/weeks and I really do not find it easy. I decided to sum up my experience, post some suggestions and perhaps get some advice how can I achieve the desired results.
First I want to say that with the cosmos library Vray really is becoming very easy to use and worth the investment, since before it was necessary to buy 3D assets online, convert them from other formats etc. Unfortunately this does not apply on animated assets.
1 - To find animated assets is not easy, there are some large packages for hundreds of euros that claim vray/rhino support, but I needed just a few models of trees or plants. I did not find any library of animated .vrmesh or .vrscene files, I did find one website (not sure if I can make publicity here) where you can filter animated models by .abc type, but the choice is limited and the usability limited (I will get to that later).
2 - I have purchased three different assets from different authors. Upon importing .abc files (each 2-5GB in size) I found out that I am not able to map them. In the proxy parameters I could see the material slots with different colors that help identify the part of the model they are assigned to. Vray material were not available, but the models came with textures so I could make the materials myself. But upon placing them in the material slots the textures were not mapped properly so for example the leaves would completely disappear when opacity texture was applied. I tried to ask the model authors for different formats, not all of them were responsive, but vrmesh worked even worse than .abc and .vrmat would not load.
3 - I decided to download trial version of 3ds max as the animated models were mostly made or at least available in 3ds max format. I tried to export the proxies and materials myself. I used vray converter to convert all the bitmaps and materials to vray, but still .vrmat upon loading into Rhino always show error message "error asset manager nothing was loaded from file undefined" and comes without textures and with confusing names, so I am not even sure where to put the textures. Anyway, trying to map animated .vrmesh proved impossible to me, .abc still the same result with badly applied textures.
4 - (Partial) victory at last! Vrscene is the format that actually worked for me, all the models were imported with textures correctly mapped. The materials do not appear in the asset editor, which is a pity cause maybe some could use little adjustments, but that is no big deal. One of the .vrscene proxies is exported in 35GB file size (original 3ds max file is less than 1MB), which can probably be reduced by using better export settings, I still need to work on (3ds max is not my weapon of choice).
My questions & suggestions:
- Is there a plan to add some animated objects into the cosmos library? Or share a few models via other channels? I myself would greatly appreciate it and perhaps also more people in the Chaos community.
- Would it be possible to release some tutorials on mapping the animated proxies? I did not find anything online.
- I think it was an amazing idea to make proxies able to be shared in vray on different platforms like between 3ds max and Rhino. But apparently it really needs to be exported well and in a specific way to work and if one does not have the original program, like 3ds max in my case, there is nothing he can do about it. Perhaps this is something that could be adjusted in the proxy parameters or some kind of in-between tool like the vrmesh_viewer.
Thanks for any feedback on this topic!
The use of pre-animated assets is advertised as " Easily add pre-animated 3D objects with animated V-Ray proxies." I have been trying to use them for the last couple of days/weeks and I really do not find it easy. I decided to sum up my experience, post some suggestions and perhaps get some advice how can I achieve the desired results.
First I want to say that with the cosmos library Vray really is becoming very easy to use and worth the investment, since before it was necessary to buy 3D assets online, convert them from other formats etc. Unfortunately this does not apply on animated assets.
1 - To find animated assets is not easy, there are some large packages for hundreds of euros that claim vray/rhino support, but I needed just a few models of trees or plants. I did not find any library of animated .vrmesh or .vrscene files, I did find one website (not sure if I can make publicity here) where you can filter animated models by .abc type, but the choice is limited and the usability limited (I will get to that later).
2 - I have purchased three different assets from different authors. Upon importing .abc files (each 2-5GB in size) I found out that I am not able to map them. In the proxy parameters I could see the material slots with different colors that help identify the part of the model they are assigned to. Vray material were not available, but the models came with textures so I could make the materials myself. But upon placing them in the material slots the textures were not mapped properly so for example the leaves would completely disappear when opacity texture was applied. I tried to ask the model authors for different formats, not all of them were responsive, but vrmesh worked even worse than .abc and .vrmat would not load.
3 - I decided to download trial version of 3ds max as the animated models were mostly made or at least available in 3ds max format. I tried to export the proxies and materials myself. I used vray converter to convert all the bitmaps and materials to vray, but still .vrmat upon loading into Rhino always show error message "error asset manager nothing was loaded from file undefined" and comes without textures and with confusing names, so I am not even sure where to put the textures. Anyway, trying to map animated .vrmesh proved impossible to me, .abc still the same result with badly applied textures.
4 - (Partial) victory at last! Vrscene is the format that actually worked for me, all the models were imported with textures correctly mapped. The materials do not appear in the asset editor, which is a pity cause maybe some could use little adjustments, but that is no big deal. One of the .vrscene proxies is exported in 35GB file size (original 3ds max file is less than 1MB), which can probably be reduced by using better export settings, I still need to work on (3ds max is not my weapon of choice).
My questions & suggestions:
- Is there a plan to add some animated objects into the cosmos library? Or share a few models via other channels? I myself would greatly appreciate it and perhaps also more people in the Chaos community.
- Would it be possible to release some tutorials on mapping the animated proxies? I did not find anything online.
- I think it was an amazing idea to make proxies able to be shared in vray on different platforms like between 3ds max and Rhino. But apparently it really needs to be exported well and in a specific way to work and if one does not have the original program, like 3ds max in my case, there is nothing he can do about it. Perhaps this is something that could be adjusted in the proxy parameters or some kind of in-between tool like the vrmesh_viewer.
Thanks for any feedback on this topic!
