asc
01-31-2003, 04:38 PM
We are currently developing a maya node that can create a variety of poly meshes based on the input data the node recieves.
Typically this node has hundreds of outMesh connections, each to an individual shape which is parented under a transform in the usual way.
In the viewport we can generate stand-in boxes instead of the actual geometry to speed interactivity and control memory use. However, we are finding that maya cannot render the volume of data this node can produce. This isn't that suprising given that each mesh (of around 1000 polys) is unique. This means no instance based approach will work. At render time Maya simply tries to handle all this geometry at once and very quickly crashes.
I've been playing around with Mental Ray for Maya and it all seems to work ok, so what I would like to know is this...
Would it be possible to write a Mental Ray geometry shader that can be passed the same data our maya node gets and hence produce the same bunch of meshes?
Assuming this is possible, will Mental Ray be able to handle the amount of data this could generate? Ideally we would pass the bounding box of each mesh to be generated and mental ray would be sensible about when it actually generates the geometry (and also when it discards it!!).
We won't be needing millions of instances of this shader to be run in a frame, but at least around 10,000 which would create about 10 million polys in total.
Finding this sort of stuff out about mental ray can be tricky so if anyone out there can give any help it'd be great.
Thanks
ac
Typically this node has hundreds of outMesh connections, each to an individual shape which is parented under a transform in the usual way.
In the viewport we can generate stand-in boxes instead of the actual geometry to speed interactivity and control memory use. However, we are finding that maya cannot render the volume of data this node can produce. This isn't that suprising given that each mesh (of around 1000 polys) is unique. This means no instance based approach will work. At render time Maya simply tries to handle all this geometry at once and very quickly crashes.
I've been playing around with Mental Ray for Maya and it all seems to work ok, so what I would like to know is this...
Would it be possible to write a Mental Ray geometry shader that can be passed the same data our maya node gets and hence produce the same bunch of meshes?
Assuming this is possible, will Mental Ray be able to handle the amount of data this could generate? Ideally we would pass the bounding box of each mesh to be generated and mental ray would be sensible about when it actually generates the geometry (and also when it discards it!!).
We won't be needing millions of instances of this shader to be run in a frame, but at least around 10,000 which would create about 10 million polys in total.
Finding this sort of stuff out about mental ray can be tricky so if anyone out there can give any help it'd be great.
Thanks
ac