Baking ParticleFlow Meshes to Disk - how does it work?

[steffenhoesel]

Hey guys,

 

its my first post in this forum, so: Hello at all out there :-)

 

Now to my problem: I need a solution for baking ParticleFlow Meshes (created by the Shape Instance) to disk for bringing them into a single object i can then cache with the Geo Cache from MentalRay - so that everything just renders quickly. I havent found anything apart from the PFlow Baker Script. But this doesnt work for me; it crashes Max even if i use just 1% of my smallest PF Source ^^

 

My scene consists of 2 PF Sources; one has just around 20.000 Objects in it; the other one has 350.000 Objects in it. They are all Groups of several polygon reduced Asteroids distributed in various random sizes within a very large Cube Volume to create a believable Asteroid Field with Debris in an Intro Scene im working on. I need to activate "Mesh per Particle" in the PF Sources Main Render Settings already so that they are even fully rendered. Calculation Time per Frame is no problem; it is still relatively fast, but: Final Gathering takes insane amounts of time to calculate the Map for all those individual objects. And as far as i know this can be greatly reduced when you make a single object out of them all.

 

So thats why i need to somehow bake the PFlow Animation of all Meshes into a Single or individual Meshes (i can then combine manually again), speed up translation times by activating the Geo Cache and (hopefully) reduce those insane Final Gather calculation times.

 

Are there any plugins out there, that REALLY get this job done properly? Commercial or not - doesnt matter! Or is there another way (workaround) to get this done?

 

Many thanks for your help in advance

Steffen