Controlling Visibility of Clones

[Mark Walczak]

Hi all,

So, I have an ambitious project ahead of me that involves lots of long, winding streets. My current plan is to create a single “tile” of street and clone it linearly. I will then use a spline wrap to make the roads twist and turn to my liking. This will also involve a single “driving” camera shot that’s going to be about 60 seconds long. Given the duration of the project, I am trying to save on render times as much as possible.

With this in mind, I am planning to rig a system using a Shader Effector and XPresso that will intelligently look at my camera position and only draw the amount of road in front of the camera (at least, whatever road is visible to the camera). I already have a rough rig set up, and things are looking good.

My main question is this: does using the “Visibility” checkbox in the Shader Effector actually influence the interactivity of my cloned chunks of road? For instance, if I have a total of 500 clones, but only 50 of them are “visible,” will my interactivity be the same as having only 50 clones, with all of them visible?

I apologize for the long post, but am very interested in everyone’s insight. If you have another idea for my approach, I am all ears!

Thank you so much for your time,

[Adam Trachtenberg]

I would imagine that the overhead would be the same, since MoGraph would still have to check each frame to determine if each clone should be visible or not … but that’s a total guess.