VrayEdgesTex and additional Material Support

[jujubee]

I assume if it were easy, it would have been done already.
Are there any plans to support VrayEdgesTex?

To a bigger question, are there some materials that you think you will never be able to to work in Vantage and could you please mark them up below so we're not asking?
https://docs.chaos.com/display/LAV/3ds+Max

Do you have a public roadmap which could let us know what features you're looking to implement. I realize this is a big ask and things change.

Also, it would be handy if there was a direct link or a popup with supported materials in Vantage, or something in VRay mat editor (perhaps color-coded) letting us know if a material type is supported or unsupported with Vantage.
It's just a lot to keep track of and my memory isn't as good as some of you programmers. I'll be working on a material only to find out my method doesn't work. It has taken a lot of time already.

Thanks!

[vladimir.nedev]

We can implement everything in Vantage, but it will slow it down and just become another V-Ray GPU which we already have.
If you want (almost) everything supported, you can use V-Ray GPU even now.

I'll be working on a material only to find out my method doesn't work. It has taken a lot of time already.

Isn't the live link helpful in this case ?
You can start it and work on your materials while it's running, so you know things are going according to plan (or not).

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[jujubee]

Honestly, it didn't know how this all worked - if Vantage was a separate development from VRay GPU and perhaps the code was more directly optimized for RTX-based cards.
From what I'm gathering from you now, Vantage utilizes most of the same principles as GPU but this is a more streamlined and functionally handicapped standalone version of VRay GPU?
So will there be some things which you never plan on adopting because they more or less become the same exact software?

TLDR as a side-note:

Not trying to brag but a little background, I originally brought up utilizing NVidia GPUs to help processing speeds vs. cpus to Vlado before they had even started working on it.

I was an early Beta tester for VRay GPU and in testing other software, I decided to move over to Octane and F-Storm because they were further along the speeds blew away having to tinker with Reinhardt, LWF, different rendering methods and sheer processing speeds.
General VRay development which had been only Max-based suddenly was getting spread thin across newly adopted 3d platforms - Corey R's VRay for SU, Maya, and so forth were being focused on and I felt Max GPU development stalled.

Recently, I heard from someone that Vantage and RTX was looking very promising so here I am. When you have entire libraries, workflows, etc. surrounding another renderer, it's difficult to make the switch to another plugin like Vray again.

I'd also add that Octane (aside from some questionable legal fallout from the developer of F-Storm) was getting more and more complicated, and each major release broke older Max files. Materials would radically change without any good explanation.
The documentation is increasingly confusing and frankly it's not nearly as fast as this. However, I don't know how Octane compares to VRay GPU these days.
Good thing with VRay is that the materials more or less stayed the same and things have a familiarity to them. The material presets (another recommendation I had made) have come a long ways and they even implemented Cosmos which is handy.
Also, I'd add that the support on these forums have become great again. It almost feels like old times so far. I just wonder if Peter, Vlado, and Teddy (is she still here?) are on as often.

[jujubee]

Unless I’m missing or doing something wrong, I don’t see how a few added materials would turn this into regular vray GPU rendering.
I have a pretty complex scene and with default VRay GPU it renders magnitudes slower than Octane. I would say a couple of minutes before it even started processing the light cache. The only difference between this and Vantage is material support. My scene has some VRayBlendMtls and Bump maps (most mats do.)It also seems much slower to load materials as well.

Flipped it back over to Vantage then suddenly everything was flying again - the biggest hit was loading the materials (maybe 30 seconds tops) then it was almost instant, even with maxing out diffuse and reflection samples.