My thoughts and wishes after doing some testing

[chroma]

I have been able to test Vantage for a bit now, and it's quite a breakthrough. Though I have the following wishes for the future for it to be a full blown product:

• Brush for painting models, especially useful for grass, and also other vegetation stuff
• Scattering ^ in relevance to the point above
• I can't clone objects inside Vantage?
• And this is for Cosmos as well; Imagine having animated vegetation ready for use in Vantage.
• More lens-effects and snacks like that
• Do changes in existing materials, and even import vray materials from a library or make new vray materials right within Vantage.
• I find the camera animation setup a bit counter-intuitive and unfinished
• Also for Cosmos: Animated HDRis, and loads of more geographically referenced vegetation. For us, scandinavia, or even more, Norway would be extremely useful to have ready for use, rather than having to spend time preparing and adding manually.
• I haven't tested this fully, but I got a feeling that more values could be animated.
• Render elements is a must, or at least very very useful in production
• And for production, yes, this could be good enough for production in many situations, as a competitor in tight projects where clients else would choose Twinmotion animations and images from untrained archviz people.
• I found it a little cumbersome to initiate livelink from a maxscene to Vantage. Is the user interface good enough here?
• As for animating things like separate lights etc, is the interface advanced enough to control/animate these parameters inside an animation? As for what I can understand, it's just animating transitions between state mods from one camera to another camera? Perhaps there is no way around a more detailed interface?
• I'm testing on a 3090 oc strix, and I'm impressed with the render times. Did 1000 frames in 1920x1080 in an hour, a job that would otherwise take 2 days on our cpu farm.

As a sidenote, I am VERY interested in finding good and animated vegetation without the need for plugins like GrowFX. I would definitely buy it if exlevel started selling animated stuff. Hints appreciated.

[vladimir.nedev]

I found it a little cumbersome to initiate livelink from a maxscene to Vantage. Is the user interface good enough here?

Do you have the Vantage tool-bar ? It should be one click to start the live link from there. It will setup your DR hosts and switch to the V-Ray GPU engine automatically.

I haven't tested this fully, but I got a feeling that more values could be animated.

Yes, we support animating a limited set of properties, but plan to extend it.
Do you have particular values in mind or you want pretty much everything to be animatable ?

And this is for Cosmos as well; Imagine having animated vegetation ready for use in Vantage.

Also for Cosmos: Animated HDRis, and loads of more geographically referenced vegetation. For us, scandinavia, or even more, Norway would be extremely useful to have ready for use, rather than having to spend time preparing and adding manually.

It might be better to start a thread in the Cosmos part of our forum for these suggestions. They will be able to tell you what the plans are.

As for the rest of the suggestions, we are considering all of them, but it will take a substantial amount of time to implement everything.
Can you tell us which are the features that would make Vantage immediately (more) useful in your work, i.e. you would be able to use it on more projects.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[chroma]

I have the Vantage toolbar. I probably just have to do the process a couple of times to be comfortable with it. This live linking needs to be initiated from the host program (eg. 3ds max) right? and if you have Vantage open, it will then load and transfer the scene automatically from 3ds max to Vantage. Is that the designed behavior? So basically I should do nothing in Vantage to make it work, rather than leaving the live link server enabled?

Regarding animation, I think any parametert should be animatable, but foremost light parameters, as this is one of the things that is hardest to get feedback on in 3ds max.

I think a more detailed and intuitive way to animate on the timeline will do wonders for our use at the moment. Also having renderpasses is useful. Maybe more lens effects, like flares? Being able to select objects and both change and alter materials would be useful as well.
I bet it will be more wishes after some more use. Thanks for a great product so far, we are looking forward to put this to use in our studio's pipeline for real.

[vladimir.nedev]

This live linking needs to be initiated from the host program (eg. 3ds max) right? and if you have Vantage open, it will then load and transfer the scene automatically from 3ds max to Vantage. Is that the designed behavior? So basically I should do nothing in Vantage to make it work, rather than leaving the live link server enabled?

Yes.

Regarding animation, I think any parametert should be animatable, but foremost light parameters, as this is one of the things that is hardest to get feedback on in 3ds max.

The animation should work when in live link mode, but you have to change the time (play the animation) in 3ds Max.
But I guess this won't do the job for you when you are animating cameras in Vantage and using a .vrscene.

Also having renderpasses is useful.

Do you mean render elements, like GI/lighting/reflection/refraction/etc or do you mean render passes like render/scene states ?

Being able to select objects and both change and alter materials would be useful as well.

That's probably a bit more long term, but for now the live link should somewhat substitute this.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev