VrayProxies displaying as full mesh with Railclone 7?

[DT]

I recently upgraded from RailClone 6.3.3 to the latest build 7.1.2 and I noticed that something changed. I though I was going insane as I have a new workstation and the viewport performance of my scenes dropped to 1/10th of my old workstation.

Case: I have a couple of RCs that creates trucks randomly in certain spots (also 1 for cars in parkings). These trucks (or cars) are very heavy for the viewport especially. So I made them into VrayProxies (bend and slice disabled). So I can see the rough shape in the viewport when I view them with quickmesh or even mesh. Now with the latest build the VrayProxy is not showing as the proxy but as the full mesh, which is VERY heavy for my viewport even with quickmesh. I can't and don't want to use pointcloud mode or box mode.

Why did this change, was this on purpose? If not on purpose I want to report a bug, because being able to see the vrayproxies as proxies is very necessary.

I know that on paper it doesn't matter for RailClone that these are proxies, but for viewport performance it is.

Can this be fixed or put back to what it originally was? Or can we have an option to have it display the proxy instead of the full mesh.

I searched on the forum and in the changelogs but couldn't find anything about it. Only found this from the 7 beta: - V-Ray proxies no longer require full mesh mode to be rendered in V-Ray GPU and Vantage. Which leads me to believe that these changes might have messed up the viewport display.
 

[Michal Karmazín]

Hi,

As you correctly pointed out, this change in RailClone 6.3.7 makes it easier to use V-Ray GPU or Vantage without having to set the show whole mesh Preview mode in the VRayProxy object, which we think is a positive improvement. If your geometry is very complex and the Quick Mesh Viewport mode isn’t performing well, I’d suggest switching to Boxes and using the Points-Cloud for the better preview. Thanks for your understanding. We'll see what can be done in future versions.

Best regards,

[DT]

Sorry to say but that is not a positive improvement and a very weird decision on Itoo's part as not everyone uses GPU or Vantage.

While this might solve an issue for GPU or Vantage, this brings an extra layer of difficulty for us that is seriously unwanted. Pointcloud doesn't give us a good representation as it's see-through and we can't see the shape of the cars well with 100s of cars or trucks, nor is it easy to see which model is actually used if you're randomizing between 30 cars for instance. Also Pointcloud even on a 5090 doesn't perform as well as just quick mesh with proxies, as well as not being able to select the pointcloud easily, or orbit around point. I tend to avoid pointcloud because well it's not a good representation in comparison to a mesh or proxy approximation.

Think of it this way, I combine several elements in a railclone definition, regular geometries and proxies and set it to quick mesh or even regular mesh (if it's not too complex). I can see what I'm doing and my viewport is smooth. Pointcloud not so much and boxes are just way too simple for lookdev, seeing if everything is nicely aligned etc. I can't do that with Pointcloud or boxes. I can't measure from a pointcloud or boxes either.

Also "V-Ray proxies no longer require full mesh mode to be rendered in V-Ray GPU and Vantage", which is technically not true, you just set it automatically to use the full mesh. Or am I missing something?

[Michal Karmazín]

Thanks for your detailed reply. We’ve had several requests in the past about how VRayProxy objects work with V-Ray GPU or Vantage. Based on this feedback, we made some adjustments to how RailClone handles these objects and as mentioned earlier, we’ll explore what can be done in future versions. Any changes will be carefully reviewed by our main developers to make sure they work well across different scenarios.

Best regards,

[DT]

Thanks for the reply, I hope you can implement this functionality (disable full mesh in viewport) as an option in a next update as I will probably have to roll back to a previous version where this behaviour is not present, which is stupid because I just paid for the upgrade for the new spline features, which means I won't be able to use them.

Thanks for considering.