does Vray support ‘Velocity Render Element’ pass from a RF Bin mesh? Not motion blur in render but to create the vectors for blurring in post.
if it’s a standard geometry bin from RealFlow import you’re talking about, then yes, it does. it’s treated as standard polygonal geometry in Maya
Really? But isn’t it a problem for vray that the mesh rebuilds from frame to frame?
an expert should chime in here, but from my experience, this is not a problem for Vray no. I ran a velocity pass from a RF geo bin sequence just fine last week.
Yes it is a stanard Geometry Bin imported from RF. I add the velocity render element in render settings.. render and no dice. whats up? perhaps those who can do this can give a quick step by step?
If you are using the latest builds of V-Ray for Maya, you may have more luck by converting the .bin files to .vrmesh files directly using the ply2vrmesh utility.
Best regards,
Vlado
oh wow great. I didnt know you could convert directly the bin to vrmesh with ply.
vrmesh does work fine for us. but its a question of is this feature supported or not in the RF bin? I have some that say it is and some that say its not so i dunno if i should keep trying to get vectors from the bin.
in this case it would be handy because our process is to take the bin into houdini to make the .geo seq. and then ply to make vrmesh so its pretty time comsuming when dealing with millions of polys. but I am having corrupted file issues. I think because the meshes are very large and I set to a pretty high preview faces 2-3 million in the ply conversion. I split my seq into 4 cchunks about 6 frames apiece each still failed import. each frame is around 800MB of mesh data in the .geo. I tested with using default preview faces and it seems to work better that way. but it takes a while because the files are so large and we already have the bin so if we could just use that it might save us some time in the future.
opps looks like you cant convert the bin to vrmesh.
You need one of the newer builds of V-Ray for Maya which includes the updated ply2vrmesh tool. If you don’t have access to the nightly builds, you can email me to vlado@chaosgroup.com for the info.
Otherwise, it should work with the RealFlow bin importer, but it might be a bit tricky - it depends on which moments in time the mesh is sampled. If motion blur is turned off, the mesh is sampled only at full frame boundaries, which may not work well.
Best regards,
Vlado
I’m also trying to get some motion blur on a realflow mesh through the bin loader with no result. Also tried to crank up the multiplier with no result. So I can confirm that it is not working. I saw a post on the max area that you needed to check the “object” option, but there is no such option in Maya? converting the bin files to .vrmesh gives me motion blur so there are motion stored in the bin’s. Running a batch to apply it on the whole sequence, so it will be interesting to see if it will work. (the bin files is about 10 gb all in total.)
Ok, so the ply2vrmesh ran over night and created a 9,5GB files that works great in maya. I must say it is impressive how it performs when loading a frame in maya. I did however get some timing issues, probably because i did not define the fps switch to 25… doh!
Our Realflow bin files are 400 Mb each, and there are 100 of them, for a total of 40 Gb.
ply2vrmesh allows to convert each bin file to a vrmesh, so we have 100 vrmesh files.
But it seems “Import Proxy” only allows one file name, how do you set this to animation ?
I don’t want to have 100 proxy nodes (I would animate their visibility, but I guess Motion Blur would no work).
A solution is to convert the 100 bin files to one big vrmesh file, but it would be a 45 Gb file (and ply2vrmesh crashes after 55 frames anyway).
Any idea ?
Thanks
This is in Maya2011 SP1, VRay for maya 1.5SP1 Nightly Build 14259, Windows 7 64 bit.
There is something to merge proxy or convert two meshs with ply2vrmesh in 0ne proxy (at the same frame) ?
This command will convert 100 bin files to 100 vrmesh files : ply2vrmesh.exe Mesh_*.bin
Problem : “Create-->VRay-->Import proxy” doesn’t allow to load several vrmesh files in a single proxy node.
This command will convert 100 bin files to 1 vrmesh file (which is animated) : ply2vrmesh.exe Mesh_*.bin Mesh.vrmesh
Problem : the vrmesh file is too big (and most of the time ply2vrmesh crashes before the end)
i have a stupid question, why would u do that? convert all rf bin into 1 vray mesh?
on my vimeo (bazuka) u can see the realflow stream tests and everything u see is vrmesh…
I know, it’s crazy, but I don’t find another way.
I would prefer to do it like this :
Convert 100 bin files to 100 vrmesh files : ply2vrmesh.exe Mesh_*.bin
Then use this menu : “Create-->VRay-->Import proxy”
and have it load the right vrmesh file for each frame (Mesh_34.vrmesh at frame 34).
But it seems the proxy node only loads one vrmesh file, not a sequence of vrmesh files.
How do you animate it ?
Use an expression ?
As it’s a string, and not an integer, I assumed it wouldn’t work.
How stupid I can be when I’m tired…
theAttr = (“pathToFiles” + frame + “.vrmesh”);
hehe, why dont u ask people its simple
1. import 1st vrmesh
2. open vrmesh node and in file name replace Mesh01.0001.vrmesh → Mesh01.%04d.vrmesh (if u have 4 digit then its %04d if its 5 then %05d)
and have fun 
i was the one who asked vlado to make rf converter
1) Select your mesh_vraymesh
2) Add an attribut integer, called “Frame”
addAttr -ln "frame" -at long mesh_vraymesh;
3) Connect the timeToUnitConversion1 to your attribut :
connectAttr -f timeToUnitConversion1.output mesh_vraymesh.frame;
4) Now create an expression like this :
string $frame = `getAttr mesh_vraymesh.frame`;
setAttr -type "string" mesh_vraymesh.fileName ("scenes/pSphere"+ frame +".vrmesh");
I use an extra attribut for the time. The reason is, in an extra attribute, the time will be evaluate to each frame in bach render.
I didn’t know the standard %04d syntax was allowed, that’s really great !
Thanks !