Vertex animations

Does anyone have a way to get vertex animation from Cinema 4D to v4?

The ideal would be using fbx export. I think the .mc files that come with an fbx contain this data, but I’m not sure if it’s possible to read it.

it’s just a binary file with vertex positions. u need to find some article on it, shouldn’t be hard to produce reader for it.

I guessed that but haven’t been able to find any documentation yet

let’s say u gonna be allright with any pointcash file, and they have quite few formats.
u got also way around to export ur fbx from max to obj or x every frame…
i got that script somewhere, can do export for u if u gonna need help with it

from c4d?

I’d love to try the script.

When using this technique (new mesh every frame) have you been able to load meshes from disk, or have you had to load into ram?

I know it will depend massively on specifics, like number of polys, but I’m just wondering about your usage :)

I’ve found obj seq very useful in some cases. When I’ve done it I loaded the whole thing.

To do it this way I found best to actually save the whole set as a single mesh with a subset per frame. Then in vvvv you have a very friendly way to just getslice the frame(s) you want.

true, everyone is right. However there is a GeometryFile node, allowing obj spread so u can getslice it after.
i don’t have script for c4d, have it only for 3ds max & maya

ok, I’ll give spreaded obj a go. Is this a standard export option from c4d?

I still didn’t find any docs for mc pointcache files.

You can:

  • script your own obj exporter
  • script a frame by frame export using the defualt obj export function (not many options)
  • use a plugin like Riptide Pro- highly recommend it for c4d<>vvvv interchange in general

hey. looking at this again.

obj seq working from separate obj files. loading into ram seems to take quite a while, though all is good once the files are loaded.

More questions :) -

Are there any performance benefits to having the files as subsets of one file?

Is obj the fastest mesh filetype to load?

Does anyone know if there would be (loading time) benefits to storing the mesh data as a texture? Not sure how feasible it is. Just saw a gsfx in mdmod called ‘GeometryFromTexture’, and don’t see a reason for it not to work. I guess the question is whether the bottleneck is loading the meshes into system ram or gpu ram?

storing the mesh data as a texture gonna give u slight buff, u can use Filetexture (2d Pooled) and free some GPU RAM… The process is not that hard, u need to write each vertex as RGB of texture. Easiest gonna be mesh split > dynamic texture > writer texture. Also u gonna need to fill empty cells. I think with floats u can write any value to color, otherwise u can normalize and write RGB normalized and A as length… The reader gonna be VertexID sample cell of texture witch is also not that hard.

The thing that confused me was the indices. Am I right in thinking that without using indices the vertices would need to be in the order to draw a triangle list? In which case there will be many duplicate vertex entries?