I am trying to create vray proxies from Frost but I am getting some weired results. Here’s how I tried doing so:
Create Frost object that loads Realflow BIN files via Krakatoa PRT loader.
I am loading > 50 million particles, and if I do not reduce the display (e.g. to 10%), max crashes. The particles are also coming from different sequences, but it seems impossible to display both sequences at the same time (using reduce). Frost, in turn creates a preview mesh in the viewport just using the reduced leftovers of the PRT loader. Anyway, in the rendering the Frost mesh is fine.
Right click on the Frost object in the viewport (which looks like a mesh around and do a Vray Mesh export for the Frost object in question (not having create Proxy checked)
After this is done, I load this very vray mesh into the scene as Vray proxy and render it. Instead of seing the Frost mesh as expected in the rendering, it looks like the meshed viewport previews…
Frost respects the current mode of Max (like PFlow does), so it switches to Render mode when a renderer is fired, and produces a viewport mesh when no renderer is active.
It sounds like the VRay feature for making Proxies is not putting Max in Render mode but just uses the viewport mesh (which for most objects is ok).
So in order to get the Render mesh from Frost into the Proxy, you would have to produce a Frost in the viewport from all particles without crashing.
I have no idea why Max is crashing though, since I just meshed 50+ million particles yesterday and it wasn’t an issue. How much RAM do you have?
What I find interesting is also that it renders fine (which means Max can generate the mesh in Render mode just ok). In other words, things point at the Max viewports.
Are you using Max 2012 or 2013 with Nitrous viewports?
Thank you for your detailed answer. I am using Max 2012 with nitrous on a Intel Xeon X5690@3,47GHz (2 CPUs) with 24GB RAM on Win7x64. It has a QuadroFX5500 GPU, driver version 8.17.12.6779.
Anyway, I will try using a different viewport mode, like openGL.
Please tell us if this helped once you have tried.
I haven’t seen Max+Frost crash, but I have seen Max lock up due to high memory usage on a machine with less memory (12GB).
If you are actually seeing a crash to desktop, please let us know. Frost is not supposed to crash. Ever.
finally, I managed to mesh > 50Mio particles without a crash. The problem wasn’t Frost!
It is vital (at least for me in that scene) to hide the PRT Loader, then set Display Particles to 100% in the PRT Loader. If I then have Frost update, after a while a mesh is displayed.
Trying to display all the PRT loader’s particles freezes Max.
Creating VRay proxies from Frost takes ages, but it works. The only problem is as soon as I put a material with Refraction on the VRay Proxy, rendering times are getting extremely high (much higher than when attaching the same mat to the original frost geom)…but I think this is something the guys at chaosgroup might have an answer for.
Did you try checking the “Use Render Particles” option in Frost? When you do this, the PRT Loader’s Render Percentage will be used (that means, the PRT Loader will pass to Frost the particles it would render without displaying them in the viewport!).
This way, you can show a low percentage in the viewport (say, 50 or 500K particles), but mesh all 50MP.
Try that and let us know if it helps…
Also, if you want to give XMesh a try, please let us know and we will cut you an eval. license. Note that only the saving requires a license, so if you produce data with the eval. license, you will be able to keep on loading it for rendering even after it expires.
Holy crap I don’t know if I would ever try and proxy mesh a Frost with anything other than XMesh, one main reason; vray proxy is only single threaded besides you can easily send the job off to another machine in a matter of seconds w/ deadline.
Which leads me to wonder if creating a fr/vray proxy from an XMesh’d Frost would be faster, either creating it or rendering it. IE a waste of time or not
