First impressions

[exarion]

Hi,

first of all, I'd like to say I'm very impressed by Chaos Vantage.
I recently bumped into it and saw the potential it has. We have a small architectural visualization studio and are limited by our rendering capacities so we usually can't offer animations to our clients. I worked with Lumion and D5, but none of them has the workflow or visual quality we need.

I decided to test it on older project of a house with quite a few Forest pack objects.

We work in 3ds Max + Corona Renderer so the first part was to convert the whole scene. Some things went alright, but many materials didn't convert correctly (though I guess that's problem of Vray).
Can you recommend me some reliable converter so that I wouldn't need to fix materials one by one?

I tried to setup animated cameras inside 3ds Max and render using the Live link. This turned out to be quite slow as it reloads data from 3ds Max between each frame and it took more time than rendering itself. So the 8s scene took between 5-6 hours.
Then I found out that I can export the scene with forest pack objects inside so it is not necessary to use 3ds Max anymore. After that the rendering times are between 1.5-2 hours which is quite a big difference.
The rendering time/quality is exceptional!

During the process I found out material limitations. What doesn't work:
- displacement
- refraction glossiness
- translucency
- procedural maps
- distance maps
- dirt maps
- round edges (edge texture)

For archviz workflow, displacement, refraction glossiness and round edges is a must.
Distance and dirt would be great too.
I believe you have many of these plans in your to-do as they are industry standart.

From other things inside Vantage I would be happy to have:
- possibility to set different light setups/scene states for each camera
- gamma and color correction for hdri

I know that I can probably just dream about Vantage for Corona as the engine is currently CPU only but would be absolutely amazing for our workflow.

Do you have some roadmap so we could check what's planned for future releases?
I believe this is amazing product and am excited what we can do with it in the future.

Some shots from work in progress.

[vladimir.nedev]

This turned out to be quite slow as it reloads data from 3ds Max between each frame and it took more time than rendering itself.

This happens only for animated objects.
Be careful with ForestPro objects, if they have "cull to camera frustum" (or another dependency on the camera) and the camera is animated, they will become animated too.

- translucency

We have support for this through the v-ray 2-sided material, should be enough for leaves, grass, lamp shades and similar.

- procedural maps

Can you be more specifc ?
We support quite a few, I think, but unlike V-Ray CPU/Corona we can't support all of them automatically, because they have to be reimplemented on the GPU.
Also, currently, procedural maps don't work for bump mapping.
Is this the issue in your case ?

- distance maps
- dirt maps
- round edges (edge texture)

All of these work by firing extra rays, so you might lose some of the performance benefit of Vantage if/when we implement them.

- possibility to set different light setups/scene states for each camera

We have such a system for the next major release of Vantage.

Nice renders btw, they will look good on the Vantage facebook group
https://www.facebook.com/groups/chaosvantage

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[exarion]

Hi, thanks for the reply.

This happens only for animated objects.

Including just camera animations?

Also, currently, procedural maps don't work for bump mapping.
Is this the issue in your case ?

Yes, that's what I meant. I tried the water surface with noise map bump and it came out flat. So for now I replaced it with bitmap.

Nice renders btw, they will look good on the Vantage facebook group

Will maybe post animation when it's done

About animations - would it be possible to export scene with animated textures so that we wouldn't need to use Live link? E.g. animated pool water etc.

[vladimir.nedev]

Including just camera animations?

If only the camera is animated, V-Ray should export only the camera each frame (which is fast).
However, if the animated camera is linked to a ForestPro object, then it becomes animated too, that's how 3dsMax works.
So you need to make sure they are not linked.

About animations - would it be possible to export scene with animated textures so that we wouldn't need to use Live link? E.g. animated pool water etc.

You mean an image sequence animation ?
That should already work in the official 1.8.5 builds.
However, the sequence is not updated automatically in the preview for performance reasons.
You have to do a "high quality render" or press the 'u' key.

For other animated parameters (e.g. procedural texture parameters, light parameters, material parameters), we implemented support for the next major release.
However, not all parameters are exported as animated by v-ray for 3dsMax. In such cases only the live link works.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[exarion]

Thanks for the replies. Hopefully, we will get some of those features one day

In the meantime I finished the animation, you can check it here - https://vimeo.com/831157301

I know it's not perfect but quite happy with the result.
What is usually the optimal rendering settings for animations? I kept the default values and 100 samples + denoise final pass. Overall it's good, though in some interiors the denoised parts make some texture/shadow flickering.

[vladimir.nedev]

Yes, I can see the flickering issues.

For the interior parts, 100 AA samples is probably not enough. But the perfect number depends on the complexity of the GI/glossy reflections.

The main options that matter are:

- AA samples
- "Reduce flickering" in the "high quality render" dialog. Enabling this might result in blurrier textures however.
- "light tree samples" - this can be increased if you have lots of lights. For the next major release we have ReSTIR DI for handling lots of lights.
- "LC sample limit" - this should be increased to at least 2000.
Another thing that helps a lot here is to have animation only on the camera, otherwise we reset the light cache each frame and this can cause flickering.
We have some improvements to make here.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[exarion]

Hi,

another question - is it possible to set up the lighting in Vantage when using the live link? I tried to render 3ds max animation and it took Max lighting settings instead of the Vantage.

And in the meantime I made another short video:

[vladimir.nedev]

another question - is it possible to set up the lighting in Vantage when using the live link? I tried to render 3ds max animation and it took Max lighting settings instead of the Vantage.

Do you mean the environment ? Because the lights' UI is hidden when you are in a live link.

If you want to keep your Vantage changes, you have to start the "live link animation render" without disconnecting the live link before that (indicated by a blue outline in the Vantage viewport and also in the status bar).

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[exarion]

Yes, I mean the environment lighting - for example setting sun in Vantage and then render using the Live link animation render.

[vladimir.nedev]

Yes, it's possible - you just need to make sure you don't stop the live link.
If you do, a new live link will be established and the scene will be loaded from scratch with the Vantage changes gone.

You can also save a config file and load it after establishing the live link.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev