I’m trying to use vray proxy as an instanced geometry in my particle flow setup. But it aint letting me pick the object. Is there a clever way around this, maybe scripted, that allows this.
Cheers.
Timbo
You might try something like this http://www.scriptspot.com/bobo/mxs5/pflow/pflow\_\_MovingObjects.htm
interesting, but not quiet what i’m after.
I’m generating my trees for an aerial tracked shot using particle flow. and i need to generate 10,000 trees, i can use the tree models in their basic form ok, i just would like to help vray out a little and use proxies.
I guess this cant be done yet.
thanks for your help tho.
timbo
The only way i could see it possible at the moment is to make a snap shop of the particles/trees either in groups or the whole lot, THEN turn that into a proxy.
might work ?!?!
Im having the same problem with particle flow and vrayproxies. Is there any other solution now to use proxies with particle flow? As far as I know PF only accepts meshes…
The idea would be to use the animation from PF with the lightweight load of vrayproxies…
can’t you use a dummy for your PF system and then use the “clone and align” tool to replace them by your vray proxys?
As far as im concerned, particles cannot be considered as individuals, but as a whole. So clone and align would have no positional information about every individual particle, thus being unable to replace them by the proxies.
Anyway, if u were able to do so, u couldnt recover the animation from the particles and use it on the proxies… 
I’m gonna write a script that will bake out the position scale and orientation keys of a pflow setup to a set of nulls (Purely to make a bridge between xsi and pflow) and you’ll be able to replace them with objects using another script - I haven’t started writing it yet but I don’t see any major difficulties yet.
That would be great! 
your a legend Jo!
Nows where is that Sea tut?
I’m pretty sure you can just use this…dummies instead of gizmos…and then use the clone and align tool after.
http://www.scriptspot.com/bobo/mxs5/pflow/pflow\_\_MovingObjects.htm
I’ll be getting to that quite soon - thankfully I’ve no deadlines in work for the next while but I’ve got a load of research to do for a cg squirrel so fun with fur and fat / muscle. I’m trying to write a very basic max to maya ascii convertor too so I can take reference points and camera animation into after effects by exporting a camera path and some null files as a .ma file - Never a dull moment
Hey Dellis, that did the trick!
Now I can have my proxies animated with particle flow, which gives me the animation strenght of PF and the lightweight of vrayproxies at render!
I had missed the link to destination feature!!
Thanks!
this actually works? this allows you to use vray proxies in a particle system
Nope - it wont let you load a vray proxy as a particle. Pflow precalculates everything into one large mesh object or if that’s too heavy for you to render splits it into a set of meshes based on your own settings but it still precalculates before render time thus taking away any benefit of the vray proxy. What the script does is transfers the motion calculated by the pflow particles onto the proxy objects so it’s the particles controlling the movement of your projects even though they don’t know it.
I mentioned this technique before in a thread about different methods for distributing trees. Its cool cause PFlow allows you a bunch of different ways to emit particles…my favourite is to paint up a black and white distribution map.
Yeah it’s a great way to deal with any kind of randomness - scatter hasn’t really been updated in any way in comparison with pflows abilities to randomly assign materials, ids and positions / scales - great stuff entirly.
If you don’t need to animate the distribution of the trees, scatter would give you quicker results.
im confused. this script dellis mentioned doesnt work to use vray proxies with pflow?
Not directly - it will allow you to transfer the position, rotation and scale keys from a particle flow to objects in your scene as if your scene objects are being tracked onto particles within the pflow. the script is not giving pflow the ability to use lazy loading and deal with massive numbers of high poly instanced objects. It’s as if you were to use the align tool on a vray proxy object and align it’s position, rotation and scale to a specific particle within a pflow for each frame and repeat the same process for a load of other scene objects.
You can use the script to transfer pflow transforms to any scene object at all so it’s not doing anything clever to make vray proxy objects suddenly compatible with pflow. The end result of having vray proxies animate like particles is the same though. One disadvantage is that there is no way to kill off a scene object after a lifespan in the same way that you can with a particle so in this case the script is placing the scene object really far below camera which will cause a huge motion blur at the frame where it’s moved. you could edit it to use visibility frames instead though.