VRay Proxy export / Standalone Issue

[robertfreitag]

Hey Tyson,
thanks for the new version! I just tried relative paths and it's just as I (and hopefully other people) would expect it. Perfect!
Now, In order to be very consistent, it would be awesome if we could use relative paths on the tyCache Objects as well, right now the 
editText fields are not editable by hand. I was able to set the path to a relative location using the asset tracker and it seems to work.

I'm still working on some RND for a production shot in which I would really like to use Tyflow instead of Thinking Particles.
But I encounter (as I mentioned yesterday) some issues regarding exports and VRay standalone.
If you could give me some advice on how to handle this, it would be amazing. 
It is also totally possible that the behavior I'm observing is caused by Chaos Groups vrscene/vrmesh exporter. 
I would just like to know on which door to knock here.

Yesterday I used the simple test scene with the capsule and the box. I could export TyCache objects to an animated vrmesh using the vrmesh exporter, 
in addition I could export vrscene files and render them with the standalone version and everything was fine and dandy.

Then, when I got back to my production scene where the meshes are more in number and heavier, I've encountered multiple problems.
Now as I've mentioned, it's a production scene and I can not post it openly, so I stripped it down to a bare minimum and got rid of most texture maps.
I was still able to reproduce the unwanted behavior. I've sent it to support@tyflow.com. To save you some time I did include the caches. ()


Problem A:
What was working in the small test scene before does not appear to work in this scene. 
So when I select the Object "tyFlow_Skull_MeshOutput" (which is a tycache object) and try to export it to a vrmesh file with the Chaos Group vrmesh exporter, 
it writes a file wich is only a few kilobytes in size and apparently does not contain any data, at least nothing shows if I import it via VrayProxy object.
The same happens if I try to export the tyFlow object itself instead of the tyCache object.

Problem B:
Since A did not work, I wanted to do it the "brutal" way, leaving all the tyCache objects in there and export the vrscene just like that so the vrscene 
exporter would dump all the animation as text. The problem here is that, if I cache out all the tyFlow objects to tyCache objects and let the export run (with only the tyCache objects in the scene) from lets say frame 1001 to 1050.
The export itself is very slow (which is expected of course) but at the very end after the last frame it's hanging for a fair amount of time... like... 15 minutes 
at least on my PC while all CPU cores are at 100% all the time. Since I cannot have a debugger running I'm just guessing into the blue here but nothing in 3ds max 
is letting all cores hang at 100% except tyFlow! Which is great of course! But I'm guessing something fishy is going on. (by the way, I can escape the wait with shift+esc, 
wich leads me to suspect even more that it is tyflow related).

Could you try to reproduce this with the scene I've sent you? It would be very much appreciated.

Also:
As I said earlier, we would like to use tyFlow on a bunch of production scenes (meaning commercial use!) if our RND is successful, but is it even legal? 
I mean, you are doing such great development and have not yet recieved a dime! We will of course buy licenses as soon as they are available.
I've read through the EULA but could not find anything about commercial use. 
Now, of course it is clear to us that if we choose to use beta software, all risk is on us and we are responsible ourselfs for everything negative that could arise from it.

Again thank you for everything! 
-Robert

[tyFlow]

Hi Robert,

1) I will make sure in the next build that tyCaches support relative path input.

2) In order for the vrmesh exporter to export tyCaches/tyFlow particles, you have to make sure they're not being processed by the GPU instancing system which bypasses regular max mesh methods and sends meshes straight to the GPU. When particles are instanced, they have no max-accessible mesh, so exporters will see tyCaches/tyFlows as being empty. Just disable GPU instancing in any tyCaches, and be sure to give any tyFlow events you want exported Mesh operators set to non-render-only.

3) tyCache export is probably slow because they have 2 phases. The first phase exports particle transforms, the second phase exports particle meshes corresponding to those transforms. If you have a lot of unique particles (ex: a highly detailed voronoi fracture), the transform phase will be very quick, while the mesh phase could be very slow depending on the setup (because it may be writing thousands of meshes to disk or whatever). Although "slow" should only be a few seconds in most cases....15 minutes is definitely odd although I haven't had a chance to dig into your scene yet to find out why.

4) It's perfectly legal to use the beta for commercial purposes, and says so on the download page explicitly, and the EULAs terminology is inclusive of commercial work as well.

[robertfreitag]

1) Fantastic, thank you!

2) Fantastic as well, if I disable the GPU caching, the meshes get exported, only downside:
It seems velocities are not exported to the vrmesh file, so no motion blur, just FYI, sorry for being a pain in the butt about it. :}

3) Okay I see, thanks for the info, well in this scene it's fairly simple. If you can check it out at some point i'd be grateful.

4) Awesome, thanks a lot.

-Robert

[tyFlow]

The vrmesh exporter is controlled by the ChaosGroup implementation, which doesn't support velocities for changing topology