Railclone 6.1.7 - Embedded Proxy Issue

[ITCodies]

Hi

We use Railclone to make racing racing tracks for the games industry. As well as using it in a conventional way to make assets and fences. We often use it as a souped up dynamic boolean mesh cutter. What I mean is we often have huge sections of terrain placed into the segment and aligned at world zero. We then do lots of real time cuts using splines as well as id swapping on the cut segments. It means that we can make mesh cuts in a none destructible manner. Often tessellating and remodelling the terrain mesh that's used as a segment. Knowing that the spline cut will happen dynamically.
Anyway the issue with this is that it can be quite slow to build the railclone. You can manage it by not having auto build on and scripting a manual build manager tool. However there is cost at load time of such a complicated railclone. I've investigated quite a few methods to improve this. Instantiating the mesh is a standard method. However we tend to put uv modifiers and various other dynamic modifiers in the stack on top of the railclone object that creates the master terrain mesh. Instantiating creates a separate snapshot mesh and turns the railcone object off. This means that the extra modifiers are on the Railclone object and do not transfer to the instantiated version. The instance is also destroyed each time you redo the process and any stack on it is lost. The answer to this problem is to use the embedded proxy mode. I've tested it and it 90% works. However it goes into box mode. Quick mesh mode also is not fit for our needs. I can see when rendering the boxes that the mesh is still fully there. I can also see that there are other posts about the issue.

I think my point is that the proxy works fine for rendering but in the games industry we really want that proxy to be the pure unpolluted mesh with all of the UV channels and Vert colours etc. So that we can export it to a game engine. Its so close to being perfect. If only embedded proxy was able to show full mesh instead of being limited. Then the modifier stack above is retained and managed within one object.

Do you have any advice for snap shotting complicated railclones in a dynamic way. I'm hoping there is some sort of scripting trick to get proxy - embedded into full mesh. If not maybe you have some thoughts on speeding up load times for complicated railclone scenes? I've experimented with a modifier that hosts an instantiated mesh and the modifier stack is on that object. It can work but seems quite unstable. Likewise snap shotting meshes leads to managing 2 object types and it gets confusing if you do it to more than one mesh. (Eg we use render meshes, physics meshes and decal meshes. Which is why the proxy solution is almost perfect but has the final mesh problem.

Railclone is a very powerful tool that seems aimed at the render industry. I feel its missing a few simple things that would make it more useful for the games industry side of things.

What I'd love is if embedded proxy were made to support displaying full mesh and then the railcone modifier had the ability to (Build and Make embedded proxy) in one click.
Likewise I'd like future versions to embed the Railclone tools so that you can (Build and Insatiate) with one click in the main interface. As well as it automatically cleaning itself up back to a dynamic Railclone when you edit again.

Thanks in advance for any advice

J