LOD Visiblity not working correctly

[Xaia]

Hi there,

Just wanted to let you know that LOD Visiblity is no longer working correctly with new Arnold.

Turning LOD Visiblity off hides the object in the viewport and from the render so it is no longer possible to hide dense meshes just in the viewport.

I am sure that in version around January 2020 everything was working correctly.

Cheers

[Stephen.Blair]

That's because customers wanted it that way, so MtoA 4.0.4 restored support for LOD visibility controlling whether objects appear in the viewport AND render.

There are now other ways to achieve hidden in viewport but visible in render. One possibility is to use Render Setup, and another one is to use the maya menu "Display > Per-Camera visibility > Hide from camera".

[Xaia]

You mean "some" of your customers wanted it that way. Right now Visibility and LOD Visibility is doing exactly the same thing if groupLOD is not set up.

I know the way with "per-camera visibility". Can you describe how to do this over Render Setup? How do you set Layer overrides to achieve the same result?

[Xaia]

@Stephen

Just tried the "per-camera visiblity" at work with the fairly light scene we are working on right now and on titan rtx I am getting 12fps with all visible and less than 1 fps with "per-camera visiblity" on.

if you have any other ideas, please let me know. I can share the video privately if you want to see it.

[AlanEddie]

This has always bugged me in Maya, so wrote a script for it.

The obvious way for Maya (not Anrold ) to solve that issue would be to introduce a simple "viewport visibility" tickbox for all transforms. The lodVisibility having two functions depending on what whether there was an lod group was ridiculous.

There are lots of options for viewing/visibility/template/reference in Maya but none that are as simple as a tickbox that should be there on each transform.

Also there is Hide/Display Geometry, under the display menu, but the items are still selectable in the viewport, so you would have to reference the item also.