I have a workflow question. I simulated something in Naiad and shaded the particles with Krakatoa and added a Frost mesh as a seperate render pass picking up my particles’ KCM color.
As it takes some time for the Frost mesh to be generated on render time I’d like to use XMesh to cache my mesh to disk.
Now, when I start a clean scene and load the cache with the XMesh loader can I use a KCM on the xmesh or do I need Genome to access velocity data of the mesh?
The Color generated by Frost is cached by XMesh. I am not sure why you want to use KCM on the XMesh.
Note that both Frost and XMesh provide an option to copy the Velocity channel into any Mapping channel (0 being the Color, 1 the TextureCoord and 2 to 99 for the other UV channels of Max). So if you do have Genome, you can check the option to copy Velocity to, say, Mapping2 and access the Velocity data there. But there really is no reason to do that if the color was already produced by the KCM and passed from it to Frost and to XMesh.
Can you explain why you want to modify the data after the XMesh caching?
Ah, okay. Thanks Bobo. Actually, I just thought it’d be faster to setup a shader after caching the Frost mesh to disk, so I don’t have to wait for the generation everytime I want to do a quick render.
My thoughts were like
“meshing->caching->shading+rendering”
and not
“meshing->shading+quick render->caching->rendering”
where shading still uses channel data I have access to in Frost.
I see.
Not all channels available in a PRT Loader will be directly accessible to a Genome on top of the XMesh.
But you could copy any of them to Mapping channels and do the shading in Genome post-caching.
For example if you want to shade by Age and LifeSpan, in the KCM you could convert the Age and LifeSpan to Floats, use a ToVector to set the X to Age and Y to LifeSpan and output the resulting Vector as Mapping3. Then in Genome set the Iteration mode to Face Corners and set the Color channel using the X/Y from the Mapping3 channel as usual…