Hey,
in the last monthy I used Vray RT a lot when lighting cars together with photographers. I often use proxies to speed up the whole process, the loading times are drastically reduced with this. Therefore I save the whole car (about 10 million polies) as a single vray proxy which is then loaded in RT. However, there is a problem with this procedure: The materials applied to the car are not exported. After loading the proxy, the whole car only has one material. Is there any way to preserve the material assignments during export? The materials are giving a much nicer representation, which is good for the photographers…
It is not possible to export materials to VrayProxy so far.
The best approach would be to activate Automatically Create Proxies option during the Vray Mesh Export procedure.
With that option turned ON Vray will import the proxy-geometry immediately after it is created and it will assign the materials automatically.
In case you want to build library and use those proxies in another projects you could select the proxy-object > save selection - this will export a separate file containing proxy-mesh with already assigned materials, then you could xref that file and the materials/textures will be preserved.
Like Svetlozar noted, there is currently no way to store the material in the .vrmesh file, but there are no problems to preserve the original material assignments.
Other than that, people have requested storing the material in the proxy before and we thought about this, but there are some questions that we don’t know the answer to:
1. What happens if you want to edit the material? Imagine you save the proxy in Max and open it in SketchUp and you realize you want to tweak the color a bit.
2. What happens with all the bitmap textures? Do we stuff them inside the proxy too, or they remain referenced as outside files? What happens if you take the proxy to another computer where the folder structure is different and the textures are not in the same place or missing?
Svetlozar and Vlado, thanks for the response. Does the described way work even if I export the whole car as a single proxy? Or will the automatically created proxy only carry a single material? You see, the problem is the sheer amount of parts on a car provided by the manufacturer. I feel that automatically creating around 7.000 proxies isn’t very fast. Besides, I had Max freezing with that amount of exports before…
If you want to export multiple objects into a single proxy file and preserve the materials you have to first either group all objects into a single group or to attach them into a single poly-mesh with the default attach-options:
Exporting thousand proxies won’t be very fast procedure especially if all pieces are very heavy.
I did a simple test with 100 teapots each with 10,000 polys = total 1,000,000 polys and it took 20 seconds to export/load them as separate proxies and 6-seconds to export/load as a single proxy.
I tried to attach the whole car into a single poly-mesh with the settings you described. Max just freezes, I think because of the big amount of parts.
Is there a way for vray proxy not to export the whole material itfself, but more like a reference or link to the material in the scene? So it doesnt get exported, but vray knows which material goes on which proxy.
Have you tried with the other option that I mentioned instead of creating a single mesh try to group the objects and then export it to a Single Proxy.
Please give it a bit more time, open Taks Manager and watch 3DSMax CPU/Memory usage - if the numbers are moving up and down the Max is working even if it looks like friezed.
The materials are not exported at all, they stay in the scene. When Automatically Create Proxy option is activated , Vray imports the proxy file automatically and assign the materials.
Yes, I tried it as a group. Took the whole car, made one group of it. Exported it as a single proxy with automatic creation. It came back into max with no material assignments.
Regarding the material export: I know they are not exported together with the proxy. But is there a way to make vray remember which object inside the proxy carried which material in the scene? I mean, when I export the car as a single proxy, I can see the object list in the proxies modifier panel. So vray seems to know which parts are in there. Would be nice if it could “connect” these parts to the corresponding material in the scene.
Svetlozar,
thanks for the response. I tried it again with the group method and automatic single proxy creation. The resulting proxy has only one material appied, the carpaint. All the other materials like the plastic from the grille or the chrome from the window linings are overridden with that carpaint material. The stripped down scene is 45mb in size, can you inbox handle this?
Some news on this one: It seems that Maya can do what I am after. Take a look at the screenshots.
It seems that the material assignment is preserved during export to proxy. Is it possible to get the same behavior in Max?
We already did this in the nightly builds actually (see the screengrab) and it will go into the next 3.0 service pack. If you need to use it sooner than that, please email me to vlado@chaosgroup.com
Thanks Vlado, this looks really promising! Unfortunately I can’t test it, because we didn’t upgrade to 3.0 yet. Would be wise to wait for the service pack then.
