Beta 2.2 RC1: SoftImage XSI plugin testing thread

[face]

Change the meshsize from meter to decimeter in the exporter and it should work.
You don´t have to change it in Octane.
Thats is only if you are using the meshimport in Octane without an exporter...

face

[adrencg]

Face, is there a way to export particle instances to a sequence of meshes?

[face]

Äh, you mean to export a PointCloud as many instances or to use Mesh sequences as instance shapes?

face

[adrencg]

I want to get every frame of an XSI particlecloud(with its instance geometry) as a sequence of OBJ files to be read in another software. At the moment, it keeps overwriting the same OBJ.

[PeterCGS]

There is a plug-in that you hook up on your rendertree that does just that.

http://www.andynicholas.com/?p=57&page=3

/Regards Peter K

[face]

So, a little report...
One speed increase with PointClouds resultant that i check if an instance shape is changed or not.
So that i must not read the topology from the shape for every point in the PointCloud.
That works great with one instance shape.

The problem begins with mixed shapes. For that, the routine will read the topology for every change of the shape.
That means, if you have a PointCloud with 2 instance shapes, nearly every point will have a other shape, so that i must read the topology.
That was a time killer. A sample looks like:
point0 shape2
point1 shape1
point2 shape2
point3 shape1
point4 shape1
point5 shape2
...
Here are 5 shape changes for 6 points. I also must read 5 times the topology.
Project that an a PointCloud with 20.000 points...

The solution i found is, that i first sort the PointCloud by shapes and write the shape id and the point number in a structure.
The result shows as below:
shape1 point1
shape1 point3
shape1 point4
shape2 point0
shape2 point2
shape2 point5
...
The effect you can see is, that the shape now switches only 2 times.
It´s now also irrelevant how many shapes you use.

An example with a PointCloud with 20.000 points and 5 instance shapes with the old method.
The shape will changed nearly every point so that the topology must read maybe 19000 times.
The same with the new method, the topology changed only 5 times...
The speed increase is also not disturbed, hurrayyyyy

The next step before the release is, to implement that with strands and finetune the LightGeo output.
Wish you all a happy new year...

face

[adrencg]

This sounds really great. Thanks for the hard work Face.

[PeterCGS]

Great work Face!

I've switched to Octane for my last two projects... Even if handling ALOT of instances is a pain right now (time wise), your plug-in rocks! I haven't encountered a single problem sofar not being able to export clean, good .obj files to Octane As soon as my projects are "on-air" I will post them here

[face]

Thanks Peter...
Here are a new thing
It´s called instand shape animation.
You can see a similar scene in the XSI_Samples as Particle_Geometry_Instancing_Shapes_and_Groups.
Now you can also export shape-, envelope- and ice-animated shapes with a random startframe.
If you load the scene, they should exported correctly.

If you want to test it, i have added the dll for 2010+ x64.
You can change this dll with the previous one under C:\Users\face\Autodesk\Softimage_2010_SP1\Addons\Octane_Exporter\Application\Plugins or a similar folder.
The dll includes the faster export for Pointclouds, Meshes and have an early LightGeo export.
The Strand export is currently not changed...

face

[adrencg]

Thanks face! So much better now. Load times are incredible compared to before.

OMG, can I actually use Octane for a real project now?