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Troubleshooting

Q-Proxies takes too long to generate the proxies

If you are trying to convert a lot of objects from your scene to proxies at once or you are dealing with extremely high-resolution meshes, the plugin may take a really long time to complete the task.

Fortunately, Q-Proxies can be configured to speed up the proxy creation in these cases. You can turn off the options ‘Convert copies to instances’ and ‘Grouped objs. as single proxy’. Then change the Mesh Type to ‘Convex hull’. (Instead of using a polygon reduction method, the convex hull method uses a built-in algorithm to produce a fast-to-compute proxy mesh).
Since version 1.20, a preset called “Fast proxies” was added to provide a quick way to set up all these options at once. Try it! 🙂

Q-Proxies does not support interactive render

This is not entirely true and in practice it’s definitely not as bad as it seems. Q-Proxies does not cause any issue with the interactive render. It’s just that it shows the low resolution meshes instead of the final objects.
The interactive render depends on the render engine you are using. They are all different. Since Q-Proxies is meant to be universal and compatible with any render engine, it does not provide specific support for that functionality.
However, this is not a major issue. You must remember that interactive render is just for preview purposes only. And so are the proxy meshes. They are a rough “preview” of the object. The production render shows the high resolution meshes as well as the final render version.

Some people are very used to working with the interactive render. However, not many years ago, interactive rendering functionality didn’t even exist. All renders were managed with the production render. So you can use the same technique. Simply save 2 different setups for the production render as render presets, one for very fast rendering (emulating the interactive render) and the other for final quality, so you can switch between them whenever you need.
Just note that this is not recommended if you have too many q-proxies objects in the scene, because it may take some time for the plugin to load all original objects back to the scene every time before rendering.

In summary, if you want to take advantage of Q-Proxies strengths like compatibility with all render engines and third-party proxies, editable .max files for proxy objects and the possibility of bringing original objects intact back to the scene, we suggest you to preview the proxies with their low-resolution meshes to work faster.

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TurboSplines Tutorial: Creating Helix Coils

This external tutorial posted by Elara Systems encompasses thorough instructions for creating Helix Coils using the TurboSplines and Path Deform plugins.

It goes over strategy for pipeline planning when using a complicated modifier stack when combining multiple external plugins. It’s a tutorial for a more advanced user of the 3DS Max System and also requires you to have the plugins listed above.

Click on the image below to watch it on Youtube:

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RandoMixer Tutorial: Animated Character Collection

This tutorial shows how to create a collection of animated characters with RandoMixer.

Topics:

  • Loading Sets from layers
  • Assign Material Variants
  • Create Collection
  • Browse Collection / Preview Animation
  • Render Collection

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Scatter Tools Tutorial: Auto-populate Furniture

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Scatter Tools Tutorial: Simple Scatter Methods

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