March of the clones

V-Ray for 3ds Max V-Ray for 3ds Max :: General
1

Here is an (ugly - sorry :-)) image for a feature that has been requested a lot and is coming the next build… 1000 animated characters with unique geometry and motion blur, done with animated VRayProxy objects (more than 27,000,000 triangles):

Best regards,
Vlado

2

WOW

i have pushed Vray proxy to the “limit” but this is WOW

here is a render with 2600 onyx trees, each have ~ 250000 poly, and dont mention the others proxys bushes, chairs, umbrellas, boats, yachts, flowers and many more..

and this animated proxy… hmm sounds delicious :slight_smile:

camr.tif.jpg
camr.tif.jpg800×450 38.8 KB

3

nice one vlado.
I have a script to do animated proxies so it will be good to see how your version works.

4

Well, the advantage over a script version is that the entire animation is stored in one file; also a velocity channel is stored if you want to do motion blur on the animated proxy later on (either 3d motion blur, or through a velocity channel).

Best regards,
Vlado

5

sounds like a much more “elegant” solution.
Cant wait to try it out.

6

looks great - how can you off-set the time, so they start animating at different points?

7

Vlado,
are we going to be able to use the animated proxies with PFLOW?

8

Animated proxies - nice!!! Vray is da best :smile:
Zillions of animated trees - kewl.

9

yeaaa…

Great news…

One big step forward… :wink:

Best regards…

10

finally vlado, good work!

11

Does that mean that a copy of the mesh is saved per step like the script? Or are just the transforms saved? Is world space position saved or just topology changes?

Sounds great been waiting for this option.

12

The .vrmesh file contains snapshots of the mesh for the different frames, so it can handle both deformation and topology changes. Whether the transformation is saved also, depends on the selected export method (as single mesh which includes the transformation, or as separate meshes which does not include the transformation).

Best regards,
Vlado

13

Vlado --

What kind of increases can we expect in the vrmesh file sizes for animated geometry? The way you describe it sounds very expensive.

Thanks!
Shaun

14

Was waiting for this a long time ago. With all the fixes to the proxy concept, it’s beginning to be bulletproof. :slight_smile: Nice work I must say. Vray kicks ass.

Finally our poor point cached 3d people can advance to a whole new level.

Best regards,

A.

15

Mostly, as large as making a new file for each frame, and then adding them together. This may be quite a lot of data, but there is really no other way around it (storing one file for each frame would be same, diskspace-wise). Of course, the file is never loaded fully into memory, only the chunks that are currently needed for rendering.

Depending on how much time I have before the next official build, I may be adding some compression to the files to reduce the disk space requirements, which should help somewhat.

Best regards,
Vlado

16

But a compressed file needs to be decompressed before use, so considering that rendertimes depend strongly on how fast can you access the proxy, it might not be the best thing to do.

Bes regards,

A.

17

Disk access is so slow, that any decompression time is negligible… futher on, since less data needs to be read from the disk, this may actually turn out to be faster…

Best regards,
Vlado

18

but, if you have a very large proxy, being read by multiple machines over the network, could that have an effect?

19

Should be even better in that case since decompression is done locally on each node. For instance, saving a 100MB Max file over a network is many times faster when that file is compressed since the main bottleneck is the network speed.

20

I see, didn’t knew how the processing times were related. But than again, what you say is fully logical, so my bad. :slight_smile: I’m really happy that you constantly work on the proxies, imo it’s one of VRay’s best features.

Bes regards,

A.