hi,
i created a multi-sub Material with lots of Vray materials in it,
assigned them to my vray proxy house and everything is ok
but i wonder :
if i assign some nondestructive modifier like a ffd, my material id information get lost and my house has only the 1st materal on it 
my hope was to get a little speedup in rendering, compared to mesh instances
yours
Thorsten
did you attached all the meshes into one mesh, before coonverting into vray proxy?
Cecil
yes, also testet the sub materials before and after converting …
everthing was working,
but the data losement begins if you assign ffd modifier… the material id`s are gone ,
if you delete the ffd modifier they come back
yours
Thorsten
When you add a modifier to the proxy, the modifier is applied on the viewport preview of the proxy, which is what will get rendered in the end, instead of the proxy itself. You can’t really modify the proxies once they have been written to disk (except for their transformation of course).
Best regards,
Vlado
enlighten us, why are you adding a FFD to a proxy and not before you convert it.
Cecil
You’ll need an “edit poly” in below the FFD to make this work. In that edit poly don’t change the verts, but re-enter the material ids. I have no clue at all if this defeats the purpose of the proxy objects. I tried this in a sample scene and it worked.
*begin conjecture*
I did a test on a simple scene with 1000 boxes in it, and it rendered way faster with the edit poly on it, which makes me think it’s not working correctly there. (Seems backwards but they were low poly objects) From what I understand in max if you want to do some deformer geometry with a multi sub on something, you need an edit poly somewhere in the stack. (Or edit mesh I guess, I don’t work in mesh). The proxy doesn’t have that, so the ffd must be making max see the FFD edited geometry as an object instead of a proxy, and in that case it loses it’s mat ids because there is no edit poly/mesh in the object stack.
All that being said, seems odd to put anything above a proxy on the stack. I don’t use them for much so maybe I’m wrong.
*gg*
at the moment i`m finishing a script which could be a big helper for distributing houses
was just testing every kind of Object and Posibility and run into that