New vray framebuffer doesn`t apply adjustments to render elements.

[dean_dmoo]

Yes, it is. The old VFB did display the color corrections in the elements, but they weren't saved in the image.
Yes, you can bring back the old VFB with this environment variable:

VRAY_VFB2_ENABLED=0

How would this work with network renders? Is it limited to the WS sending the jobs or does each node need this changed?

And with regards to my above post:
Just tested rendering without an effects channel. (So no denoiser in the render elements and lens effects turned off). Now the toning is saved in the rgb pass! Honestly, this is so infuriating and causing me to spend my weekend working out how to bypass this BS! Solution seems to be to buy a denoiser plugin for DaVinci Resolve....


"Post-process your renders without the need of a separate tool.
V-Ray equips you with a complete set of lighting, shading, and rendering tools—all integrated with 3ds Max. The redesigned V-Ray Frame buffer with light mixing and layered compositing means you only need to use one tool for more than just rendering — no need to go back and forth between different apps."

Might want to remove this text as it seems like a lawsuit in waiting.

[^Lele^]

How would this work with network renders? Is it limited to the WS sending the jobs or does each node need this changed?

Why would it matter?
Are you scripting slaves to do post work with the VFB?

And with regards to my above post:
Just tested rendering without an effects channel. (So no denoiser in the render elements and lens effects turned off). Now the toning is saved in the rgb pass! Honestly, this is so infuriating and causing me to spend my weekend working out how to bypass this BS! Solution seems to be to buy a denoiser plugin for DaVinci Resolve....

What you call "BS" we call operations order.
If it's not respected, i'm afraid things would break.
We offer offline denoising with the V-Ray package, you need buy nothing if you don't want to.

"Post-process your renders without the need of a separate tool.
V-Ray equips you with a complete set of lighting, shading, and rendering tools—all integrated with 3ds Max. The redesigned V-Ray Frame buffer with light mixing and layered compositing means you only need to use one tool for more than just rendering — no need to go back and forth between different apps."

Might want to remove this text as it seems like a lawsuit in waiting.

That sentence is valid, as see it.
It doesn't promise to cater for *your* intended workflow, it states it enables more than storing a rendered image, which it does, by offering Light Mixing and layered compositing, which it does.

[seandunderdale]

Can you explain a method to get a render out that has VFB colour corrections applied to the render, and also a separate lens fx render? From what I can tell, the effectsResult is the render that has all the VFB work applied, but also has the lens fx baked in. Its been a while since I used Vray Next but I think that option was available.

[^Lele^]

In the Composite source you build your Comp with the CCs, and save your un-glared output.
Turn on the Lens Effects, set it to create the RE.
Add another RE on top of your composite, set it to "glare".
Turn off the Lens Effects Layer visibility (NOT the effect).

See attached.

EDIT: nope, this won't work as the Glare RE gets updated even if the layer is off, albeit after a few moments.

[seandunderdale]

Does this method work with batch rendering? Am I able to submit a few shots to deadline and have the outputs all correct using this?

[dean_dmoo]

Why would it matter?
Are you scripting slaves to do post work with the VFB?


What you call "BS" we call operations order.
If it's not respected, i'm afraid things would break.
We offer offline denoising with the V-Ray package, you need buy nothing if you don't want to.


That sentence is valid, as see it.
It doesn't promise to cater for *your* intended workflow, it states it enables more than storing a rendered image, which it does, by offering Light Mixing and layered compositing, which it does.

Hi lele,

Response per point.

- The slaves save the image. So if you set your WS to vfb1 does that get transferred via backburner to the slaves as a job setting? Or do the slaves keep the vfb2 unless scripted? Haven't had the time to test it. Although obviously I just want to get the images out of the vfb 2.

- Chaos has chosen to implement a "new" workorder for vray5. In Next this wasn't an issue as the toning was saved for the rgb pass and denoised pass. Thats why I call BS, the new vfb is limiting the output options because now we have to choose whether we want a toned rgb pass OR a toned denoised pass. You can no longer get both saved out of the framebuffer when doing an animation. Well unless you think manually saving each frame is acceptable. The offline denoising is an option, but only for vrimg or exr files. I understand the need for this technically, but practically it means choosing between 2mb jpeg's or 200mb exr's. Multiplied by 1500 frames. I tried the exr's on an earlier project and it was horrible to work with imo. It does give more options in post, obviously. But then we've attempted to get the best possible result directly out of the vfb to limit post work enabling a simpler, lighter (for us) workflow. Which I see as a + for vray tbh.

- My comment was tongue in cheek, but you have already confirmed my comment; how do I get a toned rgb AND denoised output saved out of the vfb for an animation? Using the standelone denoiser is precisely what it says you don't need as that is a separate tool from the framebuffer. It's also not "my" workflow, it was the workflow present in vraynext.

But if we go further, do the vfb toning settings get saved to the exr file when you open them in a 3rd party video editor? I honestly don't know, but the last time I tried they were 32bit raw images that needed to be toned in the video editor. So again I'm not getting the toned image out of vray. But If I'm missing something I more than happy to be corrected/educated. I'm just trying to figure out the best way of getting to the needed results.

Looking at the text again, technically you might be right, you can post-process as much as you want. Just don't expect to be able to save them....

[^Lele^]

Does this method work with batch rendering? Am I able to submit a few shots to deadline and have the outputs all correct using this?

Only if you scripted it.

- The slaves save the image. So if you set your WS to vfb1 does that get transferred via backburner to the slaves as a job setting? Or do the slaves keep the vfb2 unless scripted? Haven't had the time to test it. Although obviously I just want to get the images out of the vfb 2.

The variable is of course per machine, as it's a system variable.

Chaos has chosen to implement a "new" workorder for vray5.

Not at all, it was the old which was wrong, allowing things which created issues.
The workflow for the new VFB will be made better in time, if it's an issue to you, feel free to revert to the old.

[dean_dmoo]

Thanks for the responses Lele,

But to conclude, currently it's not possible to automatically save a toned rgb pass, a toned denoised pass and a lens effects pass separately. It was partially present in VFB1 (toned rgb pass + denoised pass separately) but that wasn't a correct workflow.

So is there a timeframe when we can hope to be able to do this? Slizer mentioned it's planned in an earlier post.

Thanks!

[^Lele^]

Would you be so kind as to explain what you were doing in Next/old VFB, for animations, in a step-by-step manner?

For what we understand right now, it looks like you could do it like this:
1. image with everything in it - denoiser, lensfx, CCs
2. original RGB
3. optional - Glare pass

then you can export a LUT from the VFB2 that includes all corrections, and reapply them to your original RGB in your post application of choice.

or

Save all layers without any CC, export the CC LUT, apply the corrections to each layer in your Post application.

Also, if you're using any post application, i'd suggest you stayed away from 8bit imagery, much more so if lossy compressed, lest you'll run into incurable issues.
16bpc int PNGs or TIFFs, at the least, and *much* better 16bpc fp EXRs.
Without floating point, each time one changes brightness one creates errors due to the integer nature of the data and the fp nature of the operator.
Without looking at Fusion or Nuke, Affinity offers an fp pipeline with most of its tools available at higher precision, unlike PS, and it comes quite cheap.

[dean_dmoo]

Hey Lele,

Our workflow is as below. However it is based on a stills workflow so that's why we are running into issues with the animation atm.

01 Set up renders with exposure set in VFB (essentially burn set to very low if not zero)
02 Some light CC's and maybe a LUT
03 Save all passes as 16bit tiff's. In Next the orig.tiff and RGB_effects.tiff would both have the exposure and CC's baked in when "save all passes as separate files". Then we would turn on lens effects and save that pass as RGB_effects-glare.tiff. Giving us 3 toned beauty passes (undenoised, denoised and lenseffects). Load all passes into photoshop and finish image. This required us to save twice to get the passes.

For animations we wouldn't bother with the lens effects pass. With backburner it would save an undenoised and denoised toned beauty pass, enabling us to balance them in post.

In Vray 5 the CC's & exposure setting isn't saved in the orig.tiff. So we have to save 3 times for a still: "save all passes as separate files", turn on denoiser & save denoised pass, turn on lens effects and save lens effects pass.

And this is what is causing us issues at the moment as Vray5 won't save a toned "orig" pass so we now have to choose between a toned denoised pass or undenoised pass.

Admittedly 32bit would make it all a lot easier, but for lightness we work in 16bit and even 8bit for animations. But this is acceptable because the toned image out of the VFB is already 95% good, which is really nice tbh. A few tweaks in the post program and pretty much there. So creating heavy 32bit exr's only makes a lot more work for us when moving to post. Bigger files, slower loading times, slower program response, etc.

After running into issues this weekend we have settled on the following workflow for this project;

01 Set up renders with exposure set in VFB
02 All toning done in VFB incl Lut with save in image turned on (no denoiser or lens effects)
03 Import into Resolve
04 Clean up animations when needed with Neat Video.
05 For the renders that were already rendered with denoised turned on (but had artifacts due to fireflies) use smart match in Resolve to get the untoned rgb pass to match the toned one. Works surprisingly well, even on 8bit.

04 & 05 rescued us for this project. But the workflow has too many issues to be comfortable with for us so we'll re-think it for the next time.

[^Lele^]

It'd look to us as if you could do it quite simply this way:

Render the whole animation as straight images without color correction, optionally with denoising and lens effects (with the added Glare RE) as multi-layer EXR (as they are 16 bit floating point, crucially not 16 bit integers like tiff files.).
Do the corrections you need on a representative frame (color LUT and various CCs), and export a LUT with the corrections from the VFB.
Load the denoised footage in Resolve, apply the CC LUT you saved from the VFB2.

This way a few things are achieved properly:
a) Denoising is done properly as first operation.
b) The Lens Effect can be easily removed from the RGB with a MINUS operation, returning the original Beauty RGB.
c) The corrections can be done while the sequence is rendering, as all you need are a few reference frames.
d) You're free to tweak what you did in the VFB while in Resolve, by adding more CCs and mixing down the vfb-exported LUT's.

Notice the above workflow is strongly coupled with floating point imagery (i.e.: EXR), so to preserve color precision and the ability to perform all sorts of non-destructive processes, something inherently impossible with integer data.

[dean_dmoo]

Thanks for the workflow suggestion! Will try this out on a smaller project and try to lockdown our process.

[gaara the nightmare]

In the last Nightly build 30850 I've found that a tick box has been added to apply the color correction to all render channels.
you can find the option in Frame buffer in the VRay Tab.

You should all try your workflow and see if it solving your problem, at least it's working for me !

Thanks for the work guys !

[matanov]

Yes, it will be included in the upcoming hotfix 3 (V-Ray 5.1.3). You'll have an official version with it very soon

[seandunderdale]

Holy shit this is awesome! (I assume it'll make its way to Maya also)