topic Re: Bifrost create maya mesh creates empty mesh with no geometry in Bifrost Forum

Bifrost create maya mesh creates empty mesh with no geometry

DavidHenion — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 21:48:43 GMT

I have a fairly simple bifrost graph that scatters points on an object, culls some of them, sets/randomizes their scale, and instances droplets to an output node.

When I try to make a maya mesh - bifrost creates an empty object.

Any ideas what I am doing wrong here?

Many thanks.

Re: Bifrost create maya mesh creates empty mesh with no geometry

sepu6 — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 22:34:16 GMT

You need to bake the instances, in order for Maya to create a mesh.

Use the `bake instanced geometry` node for that

Re: Bifrost create maya mesh creates empty mesh with no geometry

DavidHenion — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 02:56:18 GMT

Thank you! While this did work, as soon as I hooked it up performance on my workstation died - it was taking over 10 seconds to cache every frame, and I barely could do anything. I just barely was able to delete history on the baked mesh and delete the bifrost bake_instanced_geometry node. Performance kinda was ok, but then when I went to save the scene it took forever (I went away and came back a couple hours later) and the file size was 560MB. So, I don't know what evil I called in to being when I added that node... 😕

Re: Bifrost create maya mesh creates empty mesh with no geometry

sepu6 — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 05:14:16 GMT

Are these droplets animated or is it a sim? if so is not the best idea to save it as Maya mesh. It won't perform great.
Quick question, are you trying to render this in a different engine other than Arnold? if so which render?

Re: Bifrost create maya mesh creates empty mesh with no geometry

DavidHenion — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 05:53:51 GMT

They don't animate - totally static.

I noticed the bifrost object didn't show up when doing some light linking, so thought I'd bake out the mesh.

Its not a biggie really, but since I'm new to using bifrost I was curious why it didn't work to create the mesh.

Is there a way to create a static mesh out of bifrost without it going crazy trying to cache the whole timeline?

Re: Bifrost create maya mesh creates empty mesh with no geometry

sepu6 — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 16:07:42 GMT

Just save then the mesh as an alembic and load it in vanilla Maya. Or you can always as well just create a Maya mesh and since you are not animating you can just duplicate the mesh and that will delete the history between Maya and BF but you still have the original in case you want to make changes in the future, then just hide BF and the mesh connected to BF (or delete it) the mesh not connected to BF will perform better.

However, if you are rendering in Arnold, you do not need to bake anything, just render the instances directly.

Re: Bifrost create maya mesh creates empty mesh with no geometry

DavidHenion — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 22:14:05 GMT

Yes in the end I just rendered it as bifrost object. I kinda wanted to manually move some of the droplets around as changing seed value always had a couple that I wanted to adjust slightly, but it was a minor point so I gave up on the baked mesh.

Still not sure why it saved a giant cache in the scene file after deleting history on the baked mesh AND deleting the bake instances node in the bifrost graph?

Re: Bifrost create maya mesh creates empty mesh with no geometry

sepu6 — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 18:25:54 GMT

Probably because is a mesh and you have more polygons, pts, etc (dense mesh) inside Maya so that's why. You can always reference the file and that will keep the .ma file that you render light.