V-Ray 3.10.01 available for download

[YoyoBoy]

Hey wow. In my first test, the VRayInstancer kicked Multiscatter's ass for rendering a forest of 20,000 trees. The "Updating Instances" stage took a little while but in the end it was nearly twice as fast.

[YoyoBoy]

...and upon further experimentation, if you use VRayProxys instead, you don't have to wait for the Updating Instances, but the render takes nearly twice as long. Still slightly faster than Multiscatter, though.

Anyone want to see how it compares to ForestPack?

[deneb26]

Wow, this is a nice update, loving it (esp. the new GGX Shader and overall rendering speedup).
I really would get my hands on that Chaosgroup logo scene with the ice material.
Vlado, is in this vast universe the smallest single possibility you would share it?

Thanks to Chaosgroup for this SP1 release; I regard is as a huge x-mass gift!
Cheers
Ale

[3LP]

I would love that scene as well
I wasn't even thinking that vray instancer could replace somehow the instancer plugins!
I'm curios to see some comparisons.

[reinaldo_handaya]

Did this work before? I'm not sure we changed anything in that regard, but one never knows...

Best regards,
Vlado

yes it happened with me too, on vray 3.00.08.

[tashko.zashev]

yes it happened with me too, on vray 3.00.08.

It looks like a 3DS Max limitation. Referenced scenes are rendered in Isolation mode even with the native scanline renderer.

[ben_hamburg]

Hey there, i can´t update right now, but I´m very interested in the Vray Instancer. Since I also couldn´t find the documentation for it, maybe you could answer me some questions:

I´m working on a scene right now, where I need to render about 100-500.000 Particles I´m scattering on the floor. The objects are around 500 verts each. But everytime I try to render, my memory starts maxing out and the render fails/crashes.
There is probably a way to limit the amount of particles to the ones actually seen in the camera view, but I´m not advanced enough in Pflow to do that...
So...

How does the instancer work?
Right now I´m using a shape instance operator in my Pflow, which is picking a group of different objects to scatter.
Can I use the Vray Instancer to achieve a renderable result?

[joconnell]

Pflow was never properly updated due to autodesk being rather silly people and it hasn't been updated or optimised since the start. What you can do in pflow is in the very first event in your flow, there are options to choose how it calculates the geometry to render. You can dump out one large mesh for the lot, a series of meshes each containing a certain amount of polys, or a single mesh per particle. If you're got a shape instances with a lot of polys and tonnes of particles, trying to calculate one great big dumb mesh can be a bit nasty memory wise so it can be slow and somewhat unstable, mesh per particle can be a bit faster to process. The issue still remains that particle flow is generating a lot of mesh to hand over to vray who can then start to render the polys. With the vray instancer, you can keep your particles with no shape at all and just use the various transform, rotation and scaling calculations so it doesn't have to handle the geometry side at all. Vray is taking over in the generation of the actual polys and it can do this in a far more efficient fashion with everything being properly multithreaded. If you've got memory worries then you've the option of using proxys as the instance at the expense of performance, otherwise you can use normal geo as your instance and get lots of speed options. One caveat is that you lose the option of changing the shape of a particle in different events though no doubt this'll get added in as time goes on.

[ben_hamburg]

Yeah, Autodesk beeing slow is the main reason I´m spending so much time here in these forums...

I´m still not quite sure how the vray instancer handles geometry from my Pflow: Does it actually replace all shape instances with the according shapes, but as proxies/instances? Or do you have to pick one object (like a proxie) as an instance and tha instancer replaces all shape instances with that one? the later case would mean I couldn´t use it, since I couldnt´pick multiple objects as instances.

I already used the "mesh per particle" option,even though I don´t consider 500 verts "Hipoly", but still: 200.000x 500 verts is still a lot to process...

[vlado]

Can I use the Vray Instancer to achieve a renderable result?

You can probably use it... here is the result from instancing a geo sphere over 180,000 particles. This took less than 2 GB of RAM and a couple of minutes.

Best regards,
Vlado

[ben_hamburg]

You can probably use it... here is the result from instancing a geo sphere over 180,000 particles. This took less than 2 GB of RAM and a couple of minutes.

That looks great...still not sure if I can use it to instance a group of objects and not just one object...

[joconnell]

I´m still not quite sure how the vray instancer handles geometry from my Pflow: Does it actually replace all shape instances with the according shapes, but as proxies/instances? Or do you have to pick one object (like a proxie) as an instance and tha instancer replaces all shape instances with that one? the later case would mean I couldn´t use it, since I couldnt´pick multiple objects as instances.

You don't need to use a shape or shape instance event at all, the vray instancer can just take the position / rotation / scale info from each particle in pflow, so no geo gets made by pflow.

[joconnell]

That looks great...still not sure if I can use it to instance a group of objects and not just one object...

The ui for instancer is pretty simple, you have two lists that you can add to, one for particle systems, another for objects that you want to use as particles. In the object list you can add as many objects as you wish and then choose between cycle or random mode for how it chooses which object to use as your particle. Pretty simple really, just set up a pflow system with no shape events in it at all, make a vray instancer object, add your pflow system in the particles list and then add your geo objects into the source objects list and render.

[ben_hamburg]

Hm. not sure if this would work then. Lets say I have a mParticles setup where the particles react to the surface and to each other, for that to work I do need some shape instances in there and as far as I have understood, the vray instancer wouldn´t replace the individual objects created by pflow with an instanced copy of those exact objects, but rather instanced random objects from that list. But I guess if I can live with no collision detection and just want to create the huge mass, this could work.

[vlado]

I really would get my hands on that Chaosgroup logo scene with the ice material.

I will see what can be done about it. It looks like we will have to redo the texture used for the ice cracks as we can't redistribute it.

Best regards,
Vlado