V-Ray Conceptual Use Questions

[dlparisi]

Totally off topic but...

I started to watch your legal demo real, nice technical work. Honestly though I couldn't watch anymore, I stopped about halfway through. All the images of people getting crushed, sprayed, rolling over, burning, etc was too much to watch . Seeing it in movies is now big deal but knowing that these things actually happenned to people made it tough.

[Mike Truly]

glyph,

Thanks for the info and example frame times. It does sound promising for my work which is a relief. I was a bit worried that with the large scene sizes, rays/sampling would be going everywhere (in many cases where there is nothing or not much to illuminate/shadow) and that this would push render times through the roof with the massive number of rays required. Looking forward to trying some experiments.

And yes, I am suffering MAX forum withdrawals at the moment - hehe - but I have been meaning to join this forum for quite some time and now I'm sure I'll have many questions as I start to use V-Ray more. (And I will still be suffering after they open 'the Area' as they won't have email lists working which is my preferred way of participating. Hopefully that will be back up soon).

Thanks again.

[Mike Truly]

emptyvoxel,

Yes, wait til someone has to start explaining to the judge & jury about Quasi-Monte Carlo sampling & such. Then you'll really see their eye's glaze over. Courtroom work has always been about story telling! (If the glove don't fit, you must aquit!).

[Mike Truly]

dlparisi,

Yes, much of the legal work can be quite disturbing with all of the death and mayhem that befalls people. I've done it for a very long time so it doesn't bother me as much as it did originally but I still think about the people and families affected by these accidents on every single project.

A positive aspect of this work is that since all my legal animations are in support of an expert witnesses testimony, I get to work with lots of different experts in different fields so I learn a helluva lot about safety and different industries, etc. which is interesting and rewarding.

Bottom line, it makes you very concious about safety and the proper way of doing things. I can't drive my car down the road without being paranoid about what other drivers may do or fire up my chain saw without thinking about safety first!

Thanks!

[meanadam]

Back on topic....

We are finishing 4.5 mins of animation of a large island architecture project. Scenes range from 8 - 80 mb. Full GI, reflections, etc. The asshat video producer was SURE it couldn't be done with the same quality as the stills.

I think we got pretty close in the end, and in less than 1/3 time we wanted to do it in (client's fault). Render times ranged from 5 - 45 mins a frame depending on the scene.

You have to start sometime or you will never learn....

[flipside]

Hey Mike,

Using standard materials is a bit slower than using vray materials. Some max materials will cause problems with vray (raytrace material, check manual I think there's more info about this).

Vray will not have problems with large scenes imo. For example if you place a large directional light to act as a sun, it will cast nice shadows wether you are zoomed in or out completely without having to set one parameter.

Maybe you can start using vray in your workflow without using GI, and still use your lighting tricks. Then in a few years I guess you will be able to use GI without any problem as computer power increases. If you have a big enough renderfarm now, you can already use full blown GI of course

You can also use only first bounce GI (ir map with new detail enhancement feature), that will be a lot faster already.

[Mike Truly]

meanadam,

Thanks very much for the project comparison and render times. It really helps to know that people are using V-Ray for large scale projects successfully. I guess I just don't recall seeing samples that are like aerial shots covering a wide area. I am looking forward to getting back into using/learning V-Ray but at the moment am backed up on modelling tasks.

Thanks again.

[Mike Truly]

flipside,

Thanks very much for the tips. It's starting to sound like there are a number of options in V-Ray to explore to expidite quality, large scale scenes.

As an aside, when first began learning V-Ray I was primarily using your Aversis tutorials which I found really helpful. Thanks for those. One thing I found in the past regarding V-Ray is that the documentation/tutorials seems somewhat fragmented and more abstract (difficult to learn) compared to the MAX docs/tutorials. Maybe it's because I'm a very visual person and like to see graphic examples (especially when explaining critical concepts like sub-divisions, ray casting, etc.). I like the way the MAX tutorials start off with teaching you really simple concepts and they revisit those concepts later on to re-inforce the concepts again. I have the Gnomon DVDs on V-Ray and they are helpful too but there's just a small bit in the beginning on sub-divisions and ray casting with graphic examples and they never seem to be re-inforced again throughout, just lots of settings without a lot of underlying explanation which wasn't as thorough as I would have liked. Perhaps it's just because V-Ray seems so much more complex conceptually compared to setting up materials/renderer in scanline. In any event, I will have to revisit your tutorials for a refresher when I get back to V-Ray learning as well as view the DVDs too.

Thanks again.

[dellis]

I've been doing litigation animations for the last ten years and i made my boss buy VRay a long ways back. For me, i was completely fine with the increase in render times(one of the bad things, even though its way way faster then other renderers), over scanline, because of GI and displacement, motion blur and all the other good stuff that vray will provide...but thats because i calculated out what an average per frame time i could handle based on the farm that we have. i have pretty good idea as to what i can get away with and change and still have a turn around time that is acceptable to the lawyers who want everything yesterday. The problem i had in the beginning was shadow flickering...but that was loser error. Once i learned vray and understood what i had to use for scenes that have tonnes of moving objects and a moving camera then it was fine. One of the many pluses though is that there were at least a handful of animations that i've done that i couldn't even render with scanline...it would just crash. I obviously can;t discuss the circumstances of the scenes but without vray proxie i would have been screwed. I say switch over...i rarely use the scanline at all anymore. I haven't tested it yet but if the DR in 1.5 works good for animations it should help with the increase in render times as well.

[Mike Truly]

Dwayne,

Thanks very much for the info. I've got a small render farm of about 10 machines of varying capabilities. Hopefully, after I gain some knowledge, I'll be able to make this work until I can aford to upgrade the farm for faster rendering.

Thanks again.