Can I get a proxy preview?

[Alex Abarca]

Ok...Scenes are getting much larger and more complicated. Everyone relies heavily on proxies (well pretty much for the last decade). Its annoying when there's many proxies in the file and start forgetting what things actually are and look like.

Can you guys gives us viewport preview? Perhaps a non-renderable Jpg plane??

MR used to have a preview in the modify rollout, it helped some, but that was more than a decade ago, I am sure we can innovate something light years better.

[matsu]

I turn on "Show Full Mesh" when I need to see the proxy. Then turn it back to box or pcloud so as not to slow down the viewport too much.

[maru]

We have the point cloud option and I don't think there are any improvements in this field planned for the near future.

[NicolasC]

IMO, the only things we would eventually miss for proxies are:

- scale option
- tool for mass-handling proxies display, a bit like this one http://www.daveandgoliath.com/blog/2011/05/09/v-ray-proxy-tools

[Alex Abarca]

Lets say for example you have a bunch of proxies of plants and trees. And would like to situate one proxy in particular somewhere in the scene? Do you click on "full mesh" one by one until you find it? Alternatively if you know the name of the model you can find it in the lister, but that's unrealistic because sometimes we keep botanical names on plants. Or lets say it was a proxy of a person, would you remember the name of your 3d scan character? Not really.

I am just giving Ondra ideas. This may be too much of simple task,  but trust me...if we can visually see our proxies it will eventually speed up our model placement.

Mental Ray had this a decade ago.

[zaar]

I can see your problem. The point clouds work well, but only to an extent. When your whole scene if full of green dots because of all your trees, bushes, grass and plants. It all becomes a bit of a green porridge that bog things down, so I usually just hide my layers with vegetation when navigating the scene or working on other stuff.

Display full mesh works pretty well in many cases, when one just needs to peek at or preview something. But there are situations where a custom preview mesh like in v-ray (sorry!) could be useful. But it requires some work to get all your assets fixed that way, especially if you want a pre-rendered image on a plane.

When we started using 3d scanned people a bunch of years ago I found it bothering that the regular "mess of tiny triangles" in v-ray pretty useless. Even if you crank it up, you spend polys in the viewport but you still can't make things out. And too few triangles and you might as well use a box as preview. And then came the new and "improved clustering" which remedied this to an extent. But it destroyed the uv's! So I started making my own custom previews, I recorded a script of me copying the mesh, adding a pro optimize modifier that keeps uv-coords (!) and then use that mesh as a custom preview for the proxy. This has the advantage of keeping them really low poly, but I'm still able to make out what the people look like. But because of the nature of vegetation this method isn't really applicable and a quick side view render slapped on a plane for a tree is much better. I've actually pondered how to automate that. There's probably already scripts out there for this, but one idea is to use Design Connected's Connecter and it's ability to batch generate previews of meshes.

And another thought is if one could use a substitute modifier together with corona proxy? Maybe you could get any preview you want, and still have your proxy?

These are just my thoughts on the subject in case any one finds it interesting or useful. I really don't think it's a problem of large magnitude or priority in Corona at the moment.