
Get it here: Q-Proxies
Q-Proxies comes with 8 useful Presets that help you quickly setup the main parameters for generating proxies, according to the type of objects you are working with. They cover the general categories of : rocks, vehicles, vegetation, sculptures and characters.
Before digging more into how the presets work and how to use them properly, it’s better to know which are the type of meshes this plugin can generate to use for proxy objects.
The plugin gives you 5 different alternatives that you can use as a proxy mesh:
As you see, there’s a wide range of options to choose from, to cover all your needs. Some are very lowpoly and lightweight, but just give you a very raw representation of the original object’s shape. Others look very similar to their reference but having much more polygons or take more time to process.
The fastest methods are Box, Convex Hull and Vertex Cloud. Using From Source can take from a few seconds to several minutes, depending on the amount of faces and objects to process.
Generating animated proxies requires always more time than static proxies, and depends on the amount of faces, objects and animation lenght.
It is about you to pick the better option for what you need. And there are also the Presets to help you.
There are 8 default presets to make a quick setup for creating proxies. These presets were thought based on different categories of objects, but every option may be suitable for other type of objects too. They are just generalizations.
Although Q-Proxies can process many different kind of objects together at once, if you plan to create proxies for different type of objects at the same scene, it is advisable to work them separately, in steps. That way you will ensure to process every type of object in the most appropriate and efficient way.
Each preset configures the options that mainly define:
to treat an object as static or animated; to apply polygon reduction or not (and how much); to bake the object’s animation or not; to turn grouped objects into a single proxy or not; what type of proxy mesh is better to use.
These are the presets, with a little description of what they do:
The recommended procedure is to firstly choose the preset that better match the type of objects you want to replace, and then adjust the parameters if necessary.
Apart from using the default presets, you may want to create your own presets. For that porpose, there are the Load and Save options, which let you store preset files to disk and reuse them later.
That’s all for this tutorial. If you have any questions or consultations, just write us throught the Contact form. Take a look at the other tutorials and the plugin’s manual for further learning.
Cheers! 🙂
People who usually work with heavy 3dsMax scenes, with a great amount of objects and polygons, often have to struggle against 2 factors:
These problems result in frustration, wasted time and a low productivity.
Q-Proxies helps you quickly downsize your heavy scenes through the automatic creation of proxy meshes, amazingly improving the viewport performance and reducing the loading/saving times. It’s an extraordinary timesaver that will greatly speed up your workflow and make your life much easier.
Q-Proxies helps you identify meshes in your scene with a high number of faces, through the use of object filters. Then, automatically replaces them with proxy meshes, wich are generally lowpoly versions of those objects, and stores the original ones (called references) in separate 3dsMax files. When you make a render, the high-resolution references are temporarily brought back to scene, aquiring the changes you made to their proxies.
This way you end up with a lightweight scene, with smooth viewport navigation, that loads and saves much faster, so you can work comfortably and efficiently.
The main difference between Q-Proxies and other proxy objects (created with third-party render engines or plugins) is that the proxy creation process here is automatic. You don’t need to manually build your proxies one by one, or plan how to optimize your scene before you actually create it. Q-Proxies can generate multiple different proxies at once, fast and effortlessly. And the best of all, it’s compatible with all render engines and third-party proxy objects, because it works independently from the current renderer and uses 3dsMax standard Editable Meshes, wich you can edit at any time.
The general procedure is:
The plugin’s UI has 5 different sections. The 3 main sections are the ones initially visible when you run the plugin:
There are 2 more tabs at the middle, with advanced options and help (Manage/Tools and Help/About), wich are not covered by this introductory tutorial.
Let’s pretend we have an architectural interior scene: an art gallery. For simplicity, this sample scene will contain just 2 elements of the art gallery: columns (cylinders) and sculptures (teapots).
So first, we are going to build this simple scene with high resolution meshes to make it heavy, and then we will use Q-Proxies to reduce it to a very lightweight scene.
When the process ends, please save the scene with a new name to compare it with the previous.
Now you will notice some incredible things in your scene:
This is the magic of Q-Proxies! 😀
Now zoom in to one of the teapots, place a camera and render a very close-up shot. Use any production renderer.
You will see the high resolution mesh at the render!
Now, while you easily manipulate a very light scene, with low resolution proxies, everything looks great and polished in the final render.
I hope you enjoyed this starting tutorial. Just play around with the plugin and its parameters and take a look at the other tutorials and the plugin’s manual for further learning.
Cheers! 🙂