Proxys like Vray?

[Rhodesy]

Just been trying out the vrayforc4d 3.4 Beta which is many times better than the older style vray but I still prefer the light quality, workflow and results of corona. I need to keep both engines though and vray is moving closer to corona in its ease of use which is definitely a plus.

One area Vray really excels in though is its proxys. Firstly the system for creating them is pretty much one click and they also save material tag info which corona currently doesnt do so you have to split all objects for each material used and then save the proxy for each and recombine. The display quality for the proxy has to be specified in the vray export which is a slight drawback where corona you can change on the imported object. But the benefits of this are really light weight files that load in a couple of seconds and are really easy to handle with no lag. As far as I can tell even with the 'load into ram' option unchecked corona still has to work pretty hard to load a 2mb scene of trees up into the viewport which makes me think its having to read the full geometry first to then create the pointcloud display as its relatively quick to switch to 'full mesh'. Finally the hit and miss polygon display style of the vray proxy gives much better clarity of shape than the point cloud option (which in itself is much better than any other method aside from full mesh).

Like I said I much prefer the output of corona but is it at all possible to get these proxy features into corona? I think the baking in the LOD display option on export helps them out here as only the low poly mesh is loaded in the viewport and loads as quick as a 2mb file should.   

Thanks

[houska]

Thanks for the compliments for Corona and tips regarding the proxys! I will move this int othe feature request section of the forums and keep it as a reference for the future when we get to improving the way proxys work.

[Rhodesy]

Just seen you had replied to this Houska thanks for looking in to this. I have given up on proxys in Corona as they just make the whole scene lag massively when you import them and switching between viewports can take an age. I suspect a lot of the issue might well be how C4D is handling them and searching for tex paths etc, which is a problem in general. But this is the only area where Vray beats Corona comfortably when directly comparing feature implementation and quality. They are quick to create and move about once exported and its easier to make out the shape of the object. All they do is create a light weight version which gets swapped out for the full res one at render time and so any loading time is only done at render time and not loaded and generated each time the scene is opened.

Do you know when you might be looking at this as there is nothing on the roadmap and I appreciate there are a number of things you guys are working on.   

[houska]

Do you know when you might be looking at this as there is nothing on the roadmap and I appreciate there are a number of things you guys are working on.   

The internal plan is Beta2, but we didn't put it into the public roadmap yet, as there is so much other stuff to do right now. But I'll remember it and try to bump it up as this seems like a pretty important thing to do. IMHO more important than a node editor for instance

[Rhodesy]

Ha ha, yes I guess it is a higher priority in terms of practical use for sure in both file size and organisation as well as scene handling in use. But damn I cant wait for a node editor. As a C4D user I feel like we are about five years behind MAX with its node editor and IPR. At least we can render progressively and not in buckets at last!

Also While im at it - with the current point cloud display option for corona proxy its very difficult to select the proxy. Essentially you have to select the UCS of the object which is quite hard to do, and rectangular marquee select doesnt seem to work either.   

[4b4]

Thanks Houska, +1 for all of Rhodesy's comments above.

I've also found the proxy's are slower to render. I've tried converting a few forester trees to regular polygon objects and then creating proxys. The preparing time is worse with the trees as proxy's as opposed to leaving them as forester tree objects.

[houska]

This is all pretty interesting reading guys. I'm sure we could look at all the problems once we have time for it. Could you maybe create a feature request thread named "Corona Proxy improvements" where you list all the troubles with Proxy, so that I can add it to the list? I'm afraid it could get lost in this thread.