I’ve been using Rail clone and Forest Pack Pro a bunch lately. The way they display their meshes as clouds is awesome. Auto-point cloud generation and representation of an object with sliders to reduce or add points and it is super fast in the viewport. This would be super rad to have as an add to VRay proxy.
Hm, I know users who complained about the point clouds and preferred the simplified mesh preview that we have in the V-Ray proxy.
Best regards,
Vlado
I suppose the option to use either would be rad. Personally, I am really liking the point cloud display stuff.
I find the forest point clouds difficult to get a read on what’s actually happening - if leaves are intersecting etc.
You could always use forest for everything - there’s the reference object distribution method in the new version so you can link them all to dummies for fine control and display as point cloud.
I would be reluctant to do that. It would mean having to read and parse all of the proxy’s geometry, which kind of defeats the purpose of the proxy.
Best regards,
Vlado
when creating a proxy there is an option "Export Point Clouds? what is it for? currently we create a mesh preview in Houdini, looks way better than the vray triangle mesh with less polygons. But this workaround is timeconsuming
I requested a few months ago in the vray for houdini forum, if it was possible to actually display the point cloud like forest pro does… i think they said they would see what could be done.
Also missing point cloud mesh preview for vray proxy. This is really essential preview option and I do not understand why even latest Vray version does not have it. It helps to save performance in viewport a lot and the user has the option to change the point cloud density for any Proxy mesh any time. As workaround for now I use corona renderer proxy, seems to work OK with Vray 5+…
UPD: corona proxy is supported, but it leads to much longer scene parsing time. Also if you cancel rendering, it runs a lot slower 
Besides what everyone else may tell you, i don’t think there’s going to be a substitute for figuring it out by yourself.
The page linked in the article you mention is a good place to start the evaluation.
OK, now we have Chaos Scatter and it can do nice point cloud previews for scattered meshes.
But for proxies not only me and @joelly3d @thescopeteam are still missing point cloud preview option, but I believe many other users find this function also useful. Why?
- Because you can control the cloud density on the fly, in other modes this is simply impossible
- Because in comparison to preview mesh mode it has almost no impact on viewport performance
- Because in most of the cases it can better represent original parts of the model.
For example, trees:
At the following link you can see that with preview mesh mode we need always to guess what optimal face count some mesh need. Otherwise we have a big chance that tree trunk simply disappear . With point cloud we can dynamically adjust the point density after exporting to proxy, which is great.
It would be great if the end user can also have point cloud mode to choose from.
After so long, any progress? What’s the purpose of the point cloud in the export window anyways? I tried many times and got no point clouds at all.
I love the forest style point preview. Sometimes I want boxes and sometimes I want the points. More of than not the points are more useful to us.
I also never understood the point cloud option of vray proxies, I only get a single dot every time.
That is because the “point” mode you refer to is that for the viewport preview.
It’s written singular, it’s meant to represent the proxy as a single point.
The Points creation is for later use at rendertime with the dynamic LOD system.
So, one creates the PC on export, and when the proxy is loaded, one can turn on the “use if present” checkbox under the “Point Cloud” section, and then modify the LOD multiplier as needed (f.e. wiring to camera distance, and so on.).
This will then forego entirely the mesh representation stored in the proxy, in favour of face-aligned primitve discs as saved during the export.
Below, a render of the teapot as proxy (1.05 GB in RAM for ~8mil triangles.), and as very low LOD with points (450MB of RAM, LOD multiplier of 100).
Man do I feel stupid for never reading the docs on this, I remembered something vaguely with the discs. Thanks for the explanation Lele. I understand the use case, but actually wonder if it’s used a lot in production. I didn’t find a way to wire the level multiplier or animate it, is this parameter exposed?
Good find, actually.
It is not, but i am convinced (and could well be wrong) it has been at some point. will investigate.
I was wrong, it had never been set to animatable in code before.
I’ll be testing a build with this animatable at some point today, and if it works without surprises, send the change through the right channels for evaluation and publishing.
Many thanks for finding this out, Ashley!
The animating seems to work without issue.
However, I should point out that there is no need to animate it for the point cloud to work as intended.
It’s simply a general multiplier to the work the LOD system will already perform based on view distance. Higher → bigger points and fewer, and contrarily the other way around.
But absolutely no need to wire it to the camera distance, that would be conceptually wrong (as i was in the earlier post suggesting it was needed.).
Animatability and wireability may still come in handy to test variations, f.e.
