Scene Assembly and Look dev pipeline with V-Ray

[Bart247]

Hi Everyone,

We use V-Ray in Maya as out primary renderer. Actually our only renderer, we don't use anything else. We want to continue with V-Ray as our rendering engine, but we are starting to feel drawback for using only Maya as our 3D software... especially in scene assembly.

We're a small studio of 8 working primarily in product visualization and the largest scenes we create are home/office environments with the outside/background usually being the heaviest polygon data. Does anyone have suggestions on how we can improve our pipeline for scene assembly and look dev?

We want to create an asset library of our models and be able to source them in any software by Alembic or USD. Idea's were think of is:

Trying Maya's scene assembly.
Building our scenes with V-Ray proxies.
Adding Katana to our workflow (Might be overkill for our size/budget)
Maybe Houdini for scene assembly?

The idea is to build around V-ray for rendering, Nuke for compositing.

We have known Maya for over 14 years, and don't have much experience with what other software or what other studios are doing, but we're very interested in trying other options for future work.

I would love to hear what works for others here and see how we could improve.

[Muhammed_Hamed]

We want to create an asset library of our models and be able to source them in any software by Alembic or USD. Idea's were think of is:

Hello Bart247

Houdini is a very good contender for your use case, many places has adapted or in the process of transitioning. For me personally Houdini does most things better than Maya, I don't mind doing everything in Houdini
Solaris is not the standard yet in all places, but it is the future honestly. Getting to adapt now is gonna help you guys in every way
You also have a very good Vray plugin in Houdini, artists will feel at home. You will have options for moving your assets across different DCCs, with Houdini engine or exporting USD from Houdini to render in Vray for Maya/3Ds Max

Best,

Muhammed

[Bart247]

Hi Muhammed,

I've been watching a lot of presentations on Houdini and everyone is saying the same thing you mentioned. Definitely on the top of the list as a consideration for us. Are you planning to completely transition away from Maya?

Don't get me wrong, I love Maya, used it all my career, but it feels like Maya is a Toyota right now and Houdini is a Tesla, just innovating and getting ahead of everyone until it will be too late to catch up.

I've been watch a lot on Katana. It looks very interesting. We use Nuke, so Katana would be an easier transition. But for such a small studio I think it may be overkill... and the price tag, ouch! I've looked at Clarisse, but I'm not sure if anyone builds living room or office interiors with that. Seems like it's really for large open environments.

[francomanko]

i feel you with regards to Maya, being using it since version 1 and it feels, with regards to archviz like im doing double the work, the hard thing for me is that a lot of archviz is using 3dmax, but transitioning to that seems like a short term move and not the best choice. I dont know alot about Houdini, but isnt that really aiming at the vfx industry?. Personally im thinking of moving more towards the realtime solutions, which kind of means, maya or max would just be for the asset creation aspects.

Its a tricky decision knowing which way to leap

@Muhammed what sort of projects are you working on with Houdini?

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Are you planning to completely transition away from Maya?

At office they kept 2 licenses for Maya as they often revisit older projects, and all new projects are done in Houdini. I've been using Houdini for 3 years so far, mostly lighting, lookdev and rendering. I have used Vray for Houdini since early beta, it is great fun. Having this good VFH plugin made the transition easier. Then you have a massive community to ask and learn from, it is a lovely community
And for the freelancing I did on the side, it depends if I will work with someone else. Sometimes I use 3Ds Max/Maya, but I prefer Houdini if I have the luxury of choice as I feel most comfortable with now
I also use C4D and Modo for some tasks, I have adapted to many tools moving from one studio to another

francomanko I spent one year in VFX using Houdini exclusively, before that it was mostly automotive rendering and product visualization. I've done interior/exterior visualization on the side as well

Bart247 I didn't use katana in the past, but I have seen katana artists look at Solaris and Houdini in the same way as me. Also considering your team is small, having Nuke in your pipeline shouldn't necessarily point you to katana
On the other hand Clarisse looks good specially for the type of massive scenes people use it for, but again I chose the Houdini path and gotten stuck to it for good

If you guys are on Discord, here is a good place to ask. Arvid is a lighting lead at ILM Vanc
He is a big katana and Maya user. And he helped me transition to Houdini, he is a big Houdini user as well

Best,
Muhammed

[Bart247]

Thanks for all the input Muhammad.
It’s very appreciated.

Maybe I’ll take my team out for drinks after work this Friday, get them all nice and liqueured up and… “so, what do you guys think of switching over to Houdini?”…commence dodging beer bottles being throw at me.

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Hahaha, should be worth the trouble

The first thing I did when I installed Houdini was install Vray and explore the shading and rendering workflows, this made me spend more time in Houdini as I had some familiar aspect.
Procedural modeling is also easy to get started with, I have spent a lot of time on that at the start
let me know if you have questions about the workflow/transition

All the best

[^Lele^]

We use V-Ray in Maya as out primary renderer. Actually our only renderer, we don't use anything else. We want to continue with V-Ray as our rendering engine, but we are starting to feel drawback for using only Maya as our 3D software... especially in scene assembly.

I'm curious about this, as i assume yours is a fairly common studio size.
I have two questions: what's wrong with assembling in Maya?
Also, do you have someone in the team oriented towards scripting/pipeline, specifically?

I ask as, while being a 3ds DOS user, myself, i have worked in Maya for a number of companies over the past 20 years, and they could achieve nigh anything they wanted, whatever the scale (i've done both advertisement/product viz and huge VFX with it, personally), albeit crucially with someone well versed in, and employed for, the scripting/pipelining.

Should you not have one such figure in your midst, evaluate if perhaps it wouldn't be less costly to hire someone to do precisely that.
Between the cost of licensing, and the somewhat more immaterial cost of change/integration (i.e. you will contract a technological debt, one to be repaid quickly if you plan to keep on producing meanwhile.), perhaps it's truly cheaper overall to hire someone.

I am obviously ignorant of your specifics, so i'm stabbing in the dark.

[Bart247]

Hi Lele,

You might be right...

My agency started as traditional marketing agency. We started developing our CG skills because our weakest point in the beginning was product imagery. If our client's didn't have nice product photography we had a trouble creating marketing material around it. So after 13 years we've now gone from logo / web design to focusing on CG video production and still imagery.

We chose Maya V 6.5 at the time and build around that. Our team never really worked in other VFX houses so we didn't see how other places were setup. We really never took a step back to evaluate our pipeline in terms of software choice rather adjusted it to the software we chose. Maya has worked great for us and we still love it. The only issue we had was in the last year. After seeing some demos I believe we could really benefit from a node based system like Houdini or Katana where you can setup separate node trees for a camera or light rig and easily switch between them.

As an actual example; We recently created a 3D house where we showcase a series of product in several different rooms. For each product we render 10 still shots. This was setup as a camera and lights changing position via keyframes from frame 100-110. We then reuse the same camera/light setup on another product on frame 200-210 by copying the keyframes and moving the parent group they are in to another room. This worked well for us because any global change to the scene such as time of day propagates to all the product shots. However we are creating a video now so we have to keep the lights in the same position from frame 100-500 for a product and not have it's group move to the next room. So we're saving new scenes per product. Global changes to the house now need to be done per product where as with a system like Katana, this would be done easily by switching the transform node paths of the camera and lights. I guess we could reference the entire house scene in for each one of the product video shots instead of working in the scene itself.

I am well aware that I may be looking for a change simply out of the satisfaction of having something new and exciting. So I have to carefully consider if a change is worth the time and cost investment.

Perhaps hiring a TD is the better answer.

Let know your thoughts on our workflow for the project above. Is there something we could have done differently?

[^Lele^]

Wow, thanks for the detailed answer!

I wish i had an arsenal of silver bullets, or that my old experiences counted for something today, but pipelining theory only really takes into consideration some general concepts, and six years out of the loop are too many to pretend i still know anything about how it's done today.
The pipelining i learnt, besides a few fundamental rules (f.e. rigorous tracking of assets, naming conventions to be defined and respected at all times, etc.), is intended to be adapted quite pragmatically: one does what works in the specific context.

Indeed, some realities i worked for had live referencing of a car model from the modelling department to lighting and rendering, through rigging, animation and look-dev.
Exceptionally elegant, but then parsing the references would take upwards of three hours (!) on a single core, while the render itself would only take ten minutes.
The parsing was unfortunately required *every time* we pressed "render".
And it was a fairly common occurrence that because of miscommunication, stuff would change in the file while a sequence was being rendered, with with tragi-comical consequences.

In other places, we had a very firm check-out system, where a department would save out and "publish" as usable a file, and the departments downstream would be able to use it.
Each change would have to be picked up by a third party (script, management system, user.), and passed through the pipeline.
This meant many more files on disk, more work from the users, but also a final LnR scene which would contain the leanest of data, and render/iterate very quickly.

There are infinite shades between the two Maya methods, but if you guys don't have someone whose time is entirely dedicated to finding out, it'll be hard to fathom which way is best.
Not because you guys can't get it, but rather because of the time you *have* to keep investing producing the goods.
I understand i may have a former invested interest, having been an LnR and Pipeline TD for a living before being hired here, but figuring you guys out would be a task a TD would lap up and run with: it's what made my former job interesting and worth spending energy for.
Sure, finding the right person, and paying for the right experience they may have accrued, won't be cheap.
Nor there are guarantees they'll be a fit, or that they may be indeed able to improve on the issues, or even that you guys will want to follow through with what they'll suggest.

But temp/trial contracts exist for a purpose, and at the very least, and perhaps at some cost, you'll have had a bunch of new ideas and avenues to explore.

For the record, i'm a huge fan of Houdini.
But that too is a tool for which you could do worse than to hire a pro to show you the ropes *for a year or two*, before you'll be all be able to walk on your own.
Even if you guys are hyper smart, the sheer amount of UI, methods, nodes, languages Houdini sports will take time to learn to production standards`, and some serious guidance (meaning: in-house, paid. instead of youtube.) can dramatically shorten it.
I say this because in 25 years of using it, the only times i made inroads, truly, were while *talking* to a pro colleague that was using it.
Tutorials too help, but because of Houdini's vastness, they are often not of general application, and often aren't well translatable to other tasks, making the hired professional the most efficient path to productability.

[Bart247]

Thanks for the informative response. I really appreciate it.

I think I'm going to look for a consultant experienced in this type of production. First to at least talk about our situation and get his recommendation.

At least, for us, V-Ray will always be a cornerstone to build around and we don't have to worry about trying a different render engine. Don't get me wrong, they're all very good. But we really know and enjoy using V-Ray. Keep up the good work.