V2 vrscenes

[Joelaff]

Can we please get v2 vrscene export capabilities (and rendering with standalone) for use locally and with other cloud solutions?

I have been reporting a number of vrscene bugs lately that plagued us in a recent project where we rendered with standalone. (Exporting from Max of course)

Rendering with standalone allows using Linux render nodes which saves a fortune in Windows licensing when cloud rendering, and provides for a modest speed increase vs windows when rendering locally.

We would very much like to be able to make use of all the v2 vrscene improvements and bug fixes.

Thanks.

[vladie]

Hi Joelaff,

Sorry for the slow reply. The new v2 vrscene portable file format is tested and intended to be used only with Chaos Cloud. That's why currently it's not recommended to be used outside of the Chaos Cloud integration.

But I believe that if you have problems with using the v1 vrscene file format with V-Ray Standalone, you might have the same issues with the v2 vrscene file format. Can you please give me the most important for you examples of such issues? I will share them with the colleagues who work on V-Ray Standalone and ask for feedback. If they can't be fixed, at least to propose a workaround. Then I'll follow up here.

Thanks,
Vladie

[Joelaff]

We have been submitting the bugs either via the bug submission form, or here on the forum. I think all the bugs we have submitted have been logged, except perhaps the OSL issue here. https://forums.chaos.com/forum/v-ray-for-3ds-max-forums/v-ray-for-3ds-max-problems/1194649-2d-texture-displacement-that-works-with-standalone-cloud

We would like vrscene2 support for standalone in general because of the issues listed in the description of the release of version 2. Smaller files would be very nice, especially for point cache type animations. Correctness is paramount. It will also be a bit of a support issue for you to find bugs the manifest themselves in only one format version.

[ivaylocg]

We appreciate the feedback and I will submit this as a feature request. But as far as I know currently there are no plans to allow the default V-Ray exporter to create v2 scenes instead of v1.

[yavor.rubenov]

Hello,

The vrscene v2 format brings mainly two things:

• slightly smaller scene size - in our tests about 30%
• Asset collection - the location of various external assets are collected and listed together with the scene. Locations are collected not the actual assets themselves. The Chaos Cloud upload application uses it to upload the assets.

I'm not very certain that those two features will help much in local render farm scenarios. There are no differences in supported rendering features between the two formats so I'm not sure it will help with your issues.

Best regards,
Yavor

[Joelaff]

The smaller file size would be nice, even locally. It would write the vrscene faster and load faster on all the nodes, reducing network traffic. With a ton of machines loading a 2GB vrscene things slow down.

Also keep in mind there are other online solutions that also use vrscene for cloud rendering. So those would also benefit from the smaller scenes being transferred over the Internet to render.

Of course I am most interested in the correctness aspect mentioned in the release info for v2 scenes:

Correctness


The list below is by no means exhaustive but the new format has fixed many bugs which were previously unknown to us. The problems only became apparent when we started comparing outputs from renders in Chaos Cloud when using the v1 and v2 scene formats.

….

Just want to make sure users using standalone locally, or on other cloud services, have access to correct behavior. Have all of these fixes also been back ported to v1 vrscenes?

This has been the biggest issue with standalone and chaos cloud… differences in rendering between Max and standalone. We have been reporting all the bugs we can, and many have been fixed. But there are still a lot of issues.

I also worry that with two versions bugs that do not affect v2 vrscenes will end up with lower priority than those that affect Chaos Cloud.

Then there is also the support/debugging issue of having to test everything, and every bug reported, with both formats. Not sure I understand the impetus for having two formats? Are the v2 scenes actually preprocessed by chaos cloud, or can they be directly rendered with standalone from the local command line?

Thanks.

[yavor.rubenov]

Those fixes mentioned are all related to asset collection. V-Ray itself didn't deal with asset collection because it is not a task when rendering - it is a task when we need to move a scene with all assets to some other place (chaos cloud in this case). Previously the chaos cloud uploader tried to do collect the assets. With vrscene format V2 V-Ray tries to list all assets in an external file making the uploader task somewhat simpler. For these reasons - no need to worry about bugs 'fixed' in one of the versions and not in the other - v1 just didn't do some of the tasks so no bug/fixes to be done there.

The down side to the V2 file format is that it now consists of 1 to 3 files depending on scene content. So if we expose it to users it will be up to the users to move all 3 files together. That is why I''m a bit reluctant to make it the default V2 or to add it as an option..

[Joelaff]

Interesting.

Thanks for the clarification on the updates and bug fixes. Glad to hear those are all covered either way.

Certainly render controllers would be coded to move all three files. We are mainly interested in the speed savings of transferring the large files with Deadline, but also reducing network usage locally would be a nice thing as well.

One of the annoying things about using vrscenes is that they take a while to write to due to there size. Are there many users who are using vrscene to render in standalone manually? It would seem to be if you are exporting to render at least you would certainly be using some sort of render controller. If you were exporting to import into other software then you would probably be knowledgeable enough to handle moving three files. Do you get a lot of support requests regarding moving vrscenes around by hand?

Thanks.