Converting instances to real meshes

[labbejason]

Hey guys,

I have a graph that takes a bunch of meshes and transforms then instances those meshes to said transforms. This creates a bif and works wonderfully. These instances belong to an asset, so I'm trying to temporarily convert the instances to actual maya meshes so that I can cache them together with the rest of the asset's meshes as one file.

I know it's not ideal and I should probably just cache them directly from Bifrost, but then I would have 2 cache files for a single asset. A lot of back-end stuff would have to be changed to support this, so for now I'm trying to avoid major pipeline changes.

The issue is that I'm getting nothing in the viewport when I connect my bifrost board's output. I'm following this link to convert them, and it works fine when I output normal meshes. So I'm wondering are instances able to do this too?

My node editor looks like this:

Out instances port is an array of amino objects and does display in the bif.

[mjcg91]

BifrostGeoToMaya only works with mesh.

You could use this compound I posted a few days ago. It takes a mesh and distribute it on points, but output a single mesh instead of instances. If you have multiple input meshes, and are using a pointID property to define the meshes's  distribution, then you could easily add a mesh selector inside the for-each loop 

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/bifrost-forum/replicate-mesh/m-p/9685326#M2721

[labbejason · Accepted solution]

Thanks Max, looks like another question you answered helped me out here!

I was able to merge all input meshes then throw them into a `for_each node` with all input transforms. In there transform the mesh with your linked answer to output an array of meshes. Then luckily in my case I don't need them separately so at the end I do a final merge and send it to the top-level output. Now passing it to a bifrostGeoToMaya node works.

Top-level graph:

For each loop graph:

Thanks again!

[moiamy]

Actually there is a out-geometry port in node editor if you use assign_material node, but sadly it doesn't work. No trick for 2023 ?

[sepu6]

What exactly does not work? Confused about what you are asking here.