Vantage pipeline?(longread)

[anan_vozak]

Hello dear developers! Finally post my personal project that I was do in spring-summer where I try to create something cool with Vanage and want to share some thoughts about it.

First I want to thank you for you support to discover your software, It was really cool to use it. This whole envirovment was designed and modeled specifically for Chaos Vantage

I want to talk about things in Vantage as part of workflow and compare it a bit with some others similar render engines:

As you now the most amaizing feature in Vantage it is compatibility with Vray and with it really can be done strong pipeline that can offset each other's shortcomings so based on this I want to try to discuss some of this parts (as far as possible for a 19 y.o. boy)

I will start with the biggest problem that I have in this scene and I think that it not one, but more of Vantage incompleteness what is expressed in a lot of noise in complex scenes, so I think it can be removed by some of this fixies:
Vantage does not support mesh light and because of this many of my lights was done by lightMtl and overall in this scene really a lot if intersecting light that even with light tree off cant produse stable result in motion and rendering slow (was trying all possible combinations and tweakings even with every light cache parametr)
So maybe it can be better wotking if vantage can use vraylight mesh or maybe have some advanced light sampling or...
The only thing that I see of temporal denoising is bluring image a lot and not remove any "boiling" noise so I really think that the most needed feature for Vantage is settings for temporal denoiser that we have in UE with it spatial samples. It can really do a big job.

Back to pipeline Vantage+Vray. I think that some of main features not to much needed for Vantage as other: most of the people do separately passes for render for better controling result on composing so it not a big issue to render sometging like fog or some of smoke effects in vray, so I would prefer to have some other features in Vantage that not as easy to complite with vray.
I talking about materials like SSS of course and all other features like anisotropy and roughness in refractive obects (but not about procedural, like vraydirt and others, because I still can get this result if I do UV and bake it - I mean only something that you now cant do in Vantage anyways)

Also want to talk about some small features that will be helful in my opinion (but Im not sure is it was fixed already because Im not use Vantage from semptember):
I was not find beauty channel when I was output my renders in passes in exr.
I think about support of alembic or point cache when I using standalone version becaouse it ofter some really lowpolycount meshes and because of that I forced to use live link. Also dont understand why animated lights isnt a thing and because of that I was using animated planes that covers the light lol.
It will be really good to have ability to exclude\include some objects from Vantage motion blur because it gives often some artefacts on static objects


I think that here it is the main features after fixing\having that Vantage can be using as really strong tool in pipeline.
I sure that not I first say that piont, but just want to say it by my self. Thank you if you read this

[fixeighted]

What an awesome piece of work....I thoroughly enjoyed watching....there's a LOT going on lol, but in a very very good way...a very consistent way I think
and although I'm not entirely sure what it's about it is pretty coheshive, even if it doesn't have a point.
You very probably have a extremely bright career ahead

[npg]

Very cool

Indeed, using light material instead of mesh lights is a problem and we're researching a possible solution. We could add more material features (and probably will at some point), but it would affect performance. There is an issue with GPU code that when you add stuff it gets slower even if the new functions are *not* used, so it's quite tricky.

Regarding missing beauty in EXR, I think you mean that we don't include the post-processing corrections there. There was a thread on the forum about that. We will probably add the option to output both raw and corrected layers to EXR.

I am curious - how many samples per frame did you use for this animation and how long did a frame take to render? Also, you said temporal denoising only blurs the image - does this mean you rendered without "reduce flickering"? In my opinion it does reduce flickering quite a bit, but maybe there was a lot of noise that overwhelmed the denoiser.

[anan_vozak]

I am curious - how many samples per frame did you use for this animation and how long did a frame take to render? Also, you said temporal denoising only blurs the image - does this mean you rendered without "reduce flickering"? In my opinion it does reduce flickering quite a bit, but maybe there was a lot of noise that overwhelmed the denoiser.

not sure but it was about 600-700 samples with light tree turned off and on my 2070 super (so it have only 8gb and this sccene barely fit in it even with a lot of optimizations) it takes in main scene reached 8-10 minutes in some cases to render it. This was painfull)), also on some seqences i forget to lick noise pattern beacuse its feature not in the main settings. Also all of this was passed threw topas video to remove noise a bit. Just memories about working on the scene with so mony light sourses still scary me

I tried reduce filckering a lot and in all my cases and scenes it ruin the image

[npg]

"Animated noise pattern" is not an important option. It just makes the random number generator generate a different sequence on each frame, so the noise will shift even if you render the same position. Unless you need to produce identical images for some specific reason, it shouldn't matter.

[anan_vozak]

There is an issue with GPU code that when you add stuff it gets slower even if the new functions are *not* used, so it's quite tricky.

I think that the SSS feature is must be in Vantage even if it eat 15% of perfomance just beacause with that material it will be possible do cinematics with characters and that can attract a lot of new users. Without that Vantage really good in architecture viz only and this is little sad