Announcing the V-Ray.exe project

[percydaman]

sounds great peter. but you know you've just now thrown down the gauntlet. Alot of people will infer alot from your post. Since at the moment Im just a hobbyist, Ill just chill and see what happens, others that depend on vray for their jobs and livelihood, probably have cause for concern considering poor implementation of previous standalone renderers. Ive been waiting for this for quite awhile so that I can move on from max into packages that will better benefit me when I choose to become a professional.

[plastic_]

peter,

noted...
i'm dying to see how you will work this out.
standalone version without the limitations of other standalone solutions?
sounds too good to be true.

[vance3d]

I think this is a great announcement. It seems like the news out of Cebas may have forced an early reveal of this product but we all knew it was coming.

Can't wait to give it a go. This is also one of the best reasons I can think of for getting up to speed on Maya.

V Miller

[peter]

V-Ray standalone for itself - will have more or less the same limitations.

However, V-Ray for MAX that connects to the standalone - will not have those. The MAX connection will work with the satndalone and take care of all the MAX stuff.

But if you want to use V-Ray for MAX and render somewhere else, without having your MAX around - you will be limited as to what can be exported and what not. But we have a solution for some of the limitations as well. Anyway, its a bit too early to go into further details.

[trixian]

Above all, the plugin system allows one to have constant model modifications and see the impact directly without having to import geometry and reset materials, stuff like that. I can it may not be that important in some practice, but for architectural vizualization, especially in the architecture competition context where the project changes a lot during the modelization procedure, and you only have a week to do three images, it's very useful. I would definitely miss that and switch to another plugin.
...

There is absolutely no reason why you should have to manually export and import scenes and models for a standalone version. In fact, I guess if the chaos guys feel up to it, they can design the architecture of the standalone version so any bridge coded by them or any 3rd party to max or maya will fit seamlessly in the native environment. Might have a few secontds more time at the beginning as you press the render button, and the bridge translates and parses the scene info to a readable format, but other than that I'd wager you could have an ui and workflow pretty identical to what you have now.
Or am I way off base here Peter/Vlado ?

[trixian]

hmm....where is my edit button?

[f97ao]

A standalone version available for more renders than max is of course a smart move since you will have a far larger customer base. It's also good to hear that not the same people are working on the .exe version. Good luck with it and looking forward to seeing renders done with Maya etc in the future.

/Andreas

[Frances]

Hi Peter,

Will it eventually be possible for someone like me to code their own interface to VRay.exe from Rhino or another modeler (such as FormZ)? I did this for another renderer using the Rhino SDK.

[Eldar]

Hmm.. impressive.

~40,000 polygon object rendering in near realtime with ambient occlusion and raytraced shadows. Not to mention, antialiasing that doesn't seem to increase the render time much.

Can't wait to see what the future holds for this project.

[crazy homeless guy]

[quote="trixianThere is absolutely no reason why you should have to manually export and import scenes and models for a standalone version. In fact, I guess if the chaos guys feel up to it, they can design the architecture of the standalone version so any bridge coded by them or any 3rd party to max or maya will fit seamlessly in the native environment. Might have a few secontds more time at the beginning as you press the render button, and the bridge translates and parses the scene info to a readable format, but other than that I'd wager you could have an ui and workflow pretty identical to what you have now.
Or am I way off base here Peter/Vlado ?[/quote]

I encourage the Vray people to look at the way Max has set up its DWG file link extension. I am modeling in FormZ, linking the file via extension into max, and rendering with Vray. In several instances I am using Vray as a standalone right now, with Max as the go between.

Something changes in my model. I change it in formz, hit update in max, and hit render in Vray. All of my textures, UVW maps, adjust automatically using the DWG file link.

Will I be setting up lighting and cameras in the Vray standalone version, or will this be handled by the app that I am using for the modeling?

[suitaloon]

There is absolutely no reason why you should have to manually export and import scenes and models for a standalone version. In fact, I guess if the chaos guys feel up to it, they can design the architecture of the standalone version so any bridge coded by them or any 3rd party to max or maya will fit seamlessly in the native environment. Might have a few secontds more time at the beginning as you press the render button, and the bridge translates and parses the scene info to a readable format, but other than that I'd wager you could have an ui and workflow pretty identical to what you have now.
Or am I way off base here Peter/Vlado ?

You know, I'm not trying to complain, and I'm not scared, and if it works that way then fine, I'll stick to vray. I just hope you are right. Maybe I didn't undertand what a standalone means. I thought it was an external program where you have to import a file from another program to work on it JUST FOR RENDERING and not for modellisation, the way lightscape was working.

[Mudvin]

The only thing i don't understand, is why there's another one file format? Why not using RIB or MI standards?

[Mudvin]

Well....there's couple of questions i got:

1. Maya 6.0 is current, but only Maya 5.0 available...i think it's not so hard to recompile this plug-in for Maya 6.0?
2. What about multiple objects in single vrmesh file? Now it exporting only single selected object per file.
3. Types of geometry other then polys? Subdivision surfaces, NURBS, particles, renderable curves?
2. Current feature set is simply frightening...how fast you plan to add other ones?
3. Why proprietary file format, why not RIB or MI files?(asked previously)
4. Any plans to support some Shading Language in future?

PS: Little addition from me...it's the script to export object from Maya and immediately render it....just don't forget to setup VRAY_LOCATION env variable on you system, and just execute vray_export() in script editor:

global proc vray_export()
{
string $cam = `getCurCam_j`;
if ( !`size $cam` ) $cam = "temp";

string $temp = `getenv "TEMP"`;
if ( !`size $temp` ) $temp = "c:/temp";
string $fName = ($temp + "/" + $cam + "_.vrmesh");

eval ("doVRayMeshExport -filename "" + $fName + """);

string $vray = `getenv VRAY_LOCATION`;
if ( !`size $vray` )
{
print ("vray_export(): Can't find VRay.exe executables, probably VRAY_LOCATION environment variable is not set, exiting.
");
}
system ($vray + "\v-ray.exe -vrmeshfile " + $fName);
}

global proc string getCurCam_j()
{
string $cam, $panel, $curCam;

$panel = `getPanel -wf`;
if (`getPanel -typeOf $panel` == "modelPanel")
{
$curCam = `modelPanel -q -cam $panel`;
return $curCam;
}
else return "";
}

[Mudvin]

Few minutes after that: Very funny to see how model shades interactively, tuning various parameters on-the-fly....maybe it's worth to leave this mode for future releases?

[Mudvin]

Khm...i mean parameters like "sampling", AO parameters, etc, i.e. ones, which usually can't be visualised with IPR renderers.