Animated proxy

[Devin Johnston]

I've never used animated proxies before but I'd like to, my first attempt hasn’t been so good. Can anyone walk me through the process of exporting an onyx tree?

[Devin Johnston]

I've been able to export one of the trees that I need but it took about 4 hours to get 500 frames and the file size is 3.1GB which seems kind of big. I also don't know how it's going t affect my memory usage when I put it in the scene or how the farm will react to such a big file. Anyone have any answers?

[Devin Johnston]

I've continued to try and export the second tree; unfortunately I keep getting an "unknown system exception" which causes Max to lock up. I've tried about 5 times now to export the same tree with no success, so I can only assume there is a bug in the vray exporter. Can anyone confirm or deny that this is a problem?

[Andrew1]

I also would be very interested to see a walk through,

if anyone has some time maybe a vid tut,

that would be cool...,

 

cheers !

[Claudio Branch]

I need to do some animated onyx trees myself. I will play around with it as well and post up what I can. Probably be over the weekend though. I am juggling 3 big jobs right now...

[Claudio Branch]

 

I've tried about 5 times now to export the same tree with no success, so I can only assume there is a bug in the vray exporter. Can anyone confirm or deny that this is a problem?

 

 

Devin, I got the same results. I was trying to proxie an onxy tree with wind applied to it. The export would give an error message between 10%-20% completion. I was not using a saved off wind file. I wonder if this matters? Did you use a wind file?

 

Awhile back I succesfully used an animated proxie on a simple mechanical assembly without error.

[Devin Johnston]

You're experiencing the same thing I am, does your maxscript window pop up when it fails?

[Claudio Branch]

yessir...

[Scott Schroeder]

Have you guys tried reducing the number of frames required for the proxy? Or, I guess I should ask can animated vray proxies be set to loop? If so, you may be able to get away with looping only 75-100 frames instead of hundreds. Onyx wind, when used in a very subtle manner generally loops without much visible popping. I see if I can do some tests too, but things are kind of stupid busy right now.

 

I wonder if you just proxied the leaves as the animated proxy and just used a single frame proxy for the rest of the tree. Again, if you are going for very subtle leaf movement you wouldn't necessarily see the branches moving all that much or if you are farther away from the camera. Then use a hero live Onyx tree for the extreme close up shots.

[Claudio Branch]

Looping the animation of the leaves sounds like a nice solution.

 

Maybe a "ping-pong" playback would work?

[Devin Johnston]

I guess that will work because I don't see any way to get around this crashing problem.

[rafa rubio]

any solution for this crashing problem..?? im still wondering if there another way to do it.. like keyframing the onyx wind .. but im still looking outhere how to do it...

[rafa rubio]

1. Import tree with tree storm.

2. Map it.

3. Add onyx wind and test.

4. apply POINT CACHE modifier

5. Set file location

6. record

7. cut modifier from tree

8. convert to mesh

9. apply modifier back (instanced)

10. export to vray proxy