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My first post so hang on for some blathering and thanks for your patience.
I own V-Ray and have learned a bit in the past via docs and DVDs but I continue to use scanline for most of my work. I keep trying to move my pipeline towards using V-Ray (this is my latest attempt) but am wondering if the uniqueness of my methods preclude V-Ray (Or Other Renderers - ORR) as my best option vs scanline.
Some thoughts.
Stills vs Animation: In looking at the beautiful images created by others using V-Ray (OOR), many of these images seemed to have been created with the end product being stills. While they are beautiful stills, my business is primarily animation. It is totally acceptable to have long render times when all you are doing is rendering a still or even several stills (I know that stills are an important product in the architecture industry). Long render times in animation is a different story and in my experience can be critical in simply 'getting the job done in time'. No client I know of will accept me saying "sorry I didn't have your animation ready for your court trial, I decided I needed to tweak the GI a bit more as the highlights weren't quite right on your crashing vehicles". Scanline is very fast for animation rendering and there are many tricks to get things done faster/better.
Big Spaces vs. Small: In looking at the beautiful images created by others using V-Ray (OOR), many of these images seemed to be of things in relatively small spaces: still lifes, room interiors, product closeups, etc. Many of my animation scenes take place over large distances: such as cars on a large race track, an aircraft landing on a 10000 ft. runway, an aircraft flying at 10000 ft. with the ground visible to the horizon, etc.
Let's take the cars on the track example. The whole track area is modeled as are the cars. In some animation views, the viewer will see the entire track in an aerial view. In other views, the viewer will be closeup on a single car, and other views will have both cars converging/crashing. In the scanline methodology I currently use, the entire scene is modeled to scale and using trickery such as having local duplicated lights (one POS multiplier/one NEG multiplier) linked to the cars plus exclusion lists, I have detailed shadows down at the local car level that can travel with each car. Whether using shadow maps or area shadows, I have local detailed shadows for each car. The illumination is provided by an overall scene light with direction basically matching the local lights. If my camera is linked to the car and travelling around the track, I can have a linked larger shadow-casting light which provides shadows to other objects in the near vicinity of the car (but not in the far distance), etc. These cheats, although not physically correct, are very fast to setup and render. If something doesn't look quite right, add another trick to fix it, etc. Lighting tricks, self-illumination, include/exclude lists, etc. are all available tools when using scanline.
There's no doubt in my mind that the quality of V-Ray (OOR) produce great looking imagery. What I'm wondering about is the practicality or advantages of using V-Ray in these large scale scenes vs scanline only.
Am I correct in thinking that there are more stills being done in V-Ray because getting clean (non-noisy) animation is harder?
Am I correct in thinking that when trying to use V-Ray lights, etc. to cast rays, samples, shadows over such a large area that render times will be impossibly slow?
Is it kosher to use standard MAX lights/materials (with all of their associated capabilities) in conjunction with V-Ray lights/materials? Is there a render time penalty for doing this?
Are there other V-Ray only capabilities one should consider vs scanline that allow one to do the impossible with scanline in these situations? (For example, I believe that V-Ray proxies allow one to place thousands of objects (such as trees for example), without a memory penalty or something?). Are there particular areas where V-Ray does some aspect of rendering much faster than scanline?
I know I've got a lot to learn about all this but it would help to know I'm not on a futile quest in trying to blend V-Ray into my pipeline of large scale scenes.
Thanks for your thoughts!
I own V-Ray and have learned a bit in the past via docs and DVDs but I continue to use scanline for most of my work. I keep trying to move my pipeline towards using V-Ray (this is my latest attempt) but am wondering if the uniqueness of my methods preclude V-Ray (Or Other Renderers - ORR) as my best option vs scanline.
Some thoughts.
Stills vs Animation: In looking at the beautiful images created by others using V-Ray (OOR), many of these images seemed to have been created with the end product being stills. While they are beautiful stills, my business is primarily animation. It is totally acceptable to have long render times when all you are doing is rendering a still or even several stills (I know that stills are an important product in the architecture industry). Long render times in animation is a different story and in my experience can be critical in simply 'getting the job done in time'. No client I know of will accept me saying "sorry I didn't have your animation ready for your court trial, I decided I needed to tweak the GI a bit more as the highlights weren't quite right on your crashing vehicles". Scanline is very fast for animation rendering and there are many tricks to get things done faster/better.
Big Spaces vs. Small: In looking at the beautiful images created by others using V-Ray (OOR), many of these images seemed to be of things in relatively small spaces: still lifes, room interiors, product closeups, etc. Many of my animation scenes take place over large distances: such as cars on a large race track, an aircraft landing on a 10000 ft. runway, an aircraft flying at 10000 ft. with the ground visible to the horizon, etc.
Let's take the cars on the track example. The whole track area is modeled as are the cars. In some animation views, the viewer will see the entire track in an aerial view. In other views, the viewer will be closeup on a single car, and other views will have both cars converging/crashing. In the scanline methodology I currently use, the entire scene is modeled to scale and using trickery such as having local duplicated lights (one POS multiplier/one NEG multiplier) linked to the cars plus exclusion lists, I have detailed shadows down at the local car level that can travel with each car. Whether using shadow maps or area shadows, I have local detailed shadows for each car. The illumination is provided by an overall scene light with direction basically matching the local lights. If my camera is linked to the car and travelling around the track, I can have a linked larger shadow-casting light which provides shadows to other objects in the near vicinity of the car (but not in the far distance), etc. These cheats, although not physically correct, are very fast to setup and render. If something doesn't look quite right, add another trick to fix it, etc. Lighting tricks, self-illumination, include/exclude lists, etc. are all available tools when using scanline.
There's no doubt in my mind that the quality of V-Ray (OOR) produce great looking imagery. What I'm wondering about is the practicality or advantages of using V-Ray in these large scale scenes vs scanline only.
Am I correct in thinking that there are more stills being done in V-Ray because getting clean (non-noisy) animation is harder?
Am I correct in thinking that when trying to use V-Ray lights, etc. to cast rays, samples, shadows over such a large area that render times will be impossibly slow?
Is it kosher to use standard MAX lights/materials (with all of their associated capabilities) in conjunction with V-Ray lights/materials? Is there a render time penalty for doing this?
Are there other V-Ray only capabilities one should consider vs scanline that allow one to do the impossible with scanline in these situations? (For example, I believe that V-Ray proxies allow one to place thousands of objects (such as trees for example), without a memory penalty or something?). Are there particular areas where V-Ray does some aspect of rendering much faster than scanline?
I know I've got a lot to learn about all this but it would help to know I'm not on a futile quest in trying to blend V-Ray into my pipeline of large scale scenes.
Thanks for your thoughts!
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