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long export times for vrmesh and alembic and huge file sizes. Use on render farms - Printable Version

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long export times for vrmesh and alembic and huge file sizes. Use on render farms - ldotchopz - 03-05-2022

I have a particle sim of about 600,000 particles. tycache exports them in about in about 10 minutes, vrmesh is only at 50% after 6 hours and at a size of 140gb. and alembic mesh is about 18gb in the first 5%, i estimate over 400 frames it will be 350gb 

tycache is only 16 gb in file size. so not sure why the others are so high?

I need to export particles for use on a renderfarm. is there something i can do to speed up / lower the size of this sim? 

I am using a super low res mesh about 6 polys per particle, i can't really go lower than that as you can see the edges. is there some way of exporting huge amounts of particles from tyflow and bring them back in and mesh them using nothing to do with tyflow?

I also have some custom properties with a gradient over time which i would like to preserve.

would prt be an option? if i loaded it in with phoenix would it preserve the colour data?

Preview of particles 
.zip   particle-preview.zip (Size: 11.07 MB / Downloads: 109)

Any help would be great!

Tyflow Pro 
Max 2022
3070x 32 core threadripper
3080ti
128gb ram


RE: long export times for vrmesh and alembic and huge file sizes. Use on render farms - tyFlow - 03-05-2022

The reason for that is because the VRay and ABC exporters don't support instancing. So, when exporting as tyCache if you have a million particles that share 1 shape mesh, the export will contain 1 shape mesh and a million transforms (very light). However, when exporting as VRMesh/ABC you'd end up with a million meshes (very heavy).

ABC does technically allow shape collapse, meaning you could get the 1-shape-million-transform result, but there are a lot of caveats that come with it, so I haven't been able to implement it yet.

Any reason in particular your renderfarm can't have tyFlow on it? Then you could export/load with tyCache which will be the quickest method.

If you export as PRT or ABC point cloud it'll be similarly light to tyCache, but you won't have the shape data. Depending on what exactly you're rendering, you might be able to add a shape mesh after. For example, you could use the VRayInstancer plugin to scatter shapes on a particle cloud.


RE: long export times for vrmesh and alembic and huge file sizes. Use on render farms - ldotchopz - 03-05-2022

(03-05-2022, 01:26 PM)tyFlow Wrote: The reason for that is because the VRay and ABC exporters don't support instancing. So, when exporting as tyCache if you have a million particles that share 1 shape mesh, the export will contain 1 shape mesh and a million transforms (very light). However, when exporting as VRMesh/ABC you'd end up with a million meshes (very heavy).

ABC does technically allow shape collapse, meaning you could get the 1-shape-million-transform result, but there are a lot of caveats that come with it, so I haven't been able to implement it yet.

Any reason in particular your renderfarm can't have tyFlow on it? Then you could export/load with tyCache which will be the quickest method.

If you export as PRT or ABC point cloud it'll be similarly light to tyCache, but you won't have the shape data. Depending on what exactly you're rendering, you might be able to add a shape mesh after. For example, you could use the VRayInstancer plugin to scatter shapes on a particle cloud.

Ah okay that makes sense. thank you.

Its a cloud renderfarm actually, and they just don't support it right now. they have plans to but the options they gave were alembic export for the time being. 

Would the vray instancer keep the mapping data do you know?


RE: long export times for vrmesh and alembic and huge file sizes. Use on render farms - tyFlow - 03-06-2022

The Mapping overrides within tyFlow? I don't think so, no.