XMesh Tab

Overview

The current XMesh NK source node only supports a single sequence that is used for both rendering and display, and does not yet support a lower-res proxy sequence for viewport display.

Controls

XMesh Sequence

This sequence is used for both rendering and viewport display.

Loading Mode

Specifies how the xmesh is loaded and displayed, and controls the behaviour when sub-frames are requested by the renderer to produce motion blur.

None

No mesh is loaded.

Single Frame

Only the specified frame is loaded. If the XMesh Sequence field specifies a range of frames, the first frame in the range is loaded.

Velocity Offset

Uses the nearest full frame and the corresponding velocity channel (if generated during the saving process). The vertices will be moved along the velocity vector. The result is linear interpolation between a full frame and half a frame later due to the linear nature of the velocity data.

Subframe Velocity Offset

Uses the nearest sub-frame file and its velocity channel (if available). If you have saved sub-frames by setting the step value in the saver to a value less than 1.0, the XMesh Loader will take full advantage of the sub-frame data. Switching back to “Frame Velocity Offset” will effectively ignore the sub-frame data on disk. Using sub-frames will allow you to produce more curved vertex motion between two frames thanks to the additional samples stored in the sub-frame files. The higher the number of sub-frames, the closer the vertex interpolation will be to the original motion, at cost of disk space. If only the vertices are changing position (all other channels like face list, material ids, smoothing, texture/mapping coords etc. are the same), a sub-frame will contain just the vertex list and velocity channels, with all other channels reused from a previous frame. Thus, using multiple sub-frames does not necessarily cost too much disk space and is more similar to point caching.

Frame Interpolate

Uses the two surrounding full frames and, given consistent topology, produces the sub-frame vertex positions on the fly without the use of the pre-saved velocity channel. If the two frames have mismatching topologies, no sub-frame data will be generated and the closest full frame will be used.

Subframe Interpolate

Uses the two surrounding sub-frames, otherwise the same as the previous mode. If no sub-frames were generated at saving time, it behaves identically to “Frame Interpolation”. Switching to frame interpolation effectively ignores any sub-frame files on disk.