Basics of Rendering in Vray

[fuzzpopfx]

So I've been using VRay for quite a while. And I wonder why there are some basic and needed features missing.

Why aren't there controls for the specular model in a Vray Material? I can adjust highlight glossiness but not highlight intensity.

Brazil 1 provided a feature that had been needed and missing for ages in Max materials -- the Extra Light slot. Why doesn't VRay provide this? It is incredibly intuitive for the artist to be able to just add additional light to a material.

Again, another thing that Brazil 1 provided that was heavily needed was the sheen highlight. It is most amazingly intuitive and effective way for producing highlights on glancing angle surfaces. Why hasn't VRay taken note and added this as well?

I just really don't understand why these obviously handy and incredibly basic features don't exist, when V-Ray has already gone over the top with its advanced features. I honestly hated and despised V-Ray when I first started using it because of the lack of material features, combined with the fact that the materials confuse everyone. I've worked in two studios where I was the only one who had a proper understanding of how vray's reflection and refraction parameters work. It took me a lot of effort to train people how to use them correctly. Its like vray tries to make it easier to make good materials but instead makes it actually more confusing.

[Morbid Angel]

well its actually the other way around.
Brazil and others by having the features you are talking of, made the shaders incorrect and physically not accurate. Vray tries to be as physically accurate as possible without being overly complicated.
Adding fake highlites and custom per shader lights can also be very complicated.

But I have to agree on the part that, vray defenently lacks shader power. Its one of its most weakest points and Im saddened to see its being overlooked for years.
To answer your question directly, vray material is a very complicated shader. So complicated that adding anything to it is a lot of work. Hance, we don't see controls like the ones you are talking of.
The easiest way for me to picture vray shaders, is to have multiple shaders for each of the functions separated. And custom controls added to each of those. Much like in mental ray.

[_jaro]

V-ray 1.6 may bring some of this handy, user-friendly features

[victor.nsy]

It's always cool to have more stuff in a tool but also think about
learning curve for new users in a studio environment ... think about
the fact that vray is successful in it's user interface. Think about the
buggssss that could come along... to eat our production time.

I think no render engine can be perfect ... everyone wants something
more. The thing to consider , by implementing a tool would it greatly improve
the general production workflow. Giving too much gimmick would just
make a tool sluggish to use ... and there are many examples software
out there that veered away from it's original design.

[Kyle_Grace]

I think a lot of people agree that to have taylored shaders in vray would be an excellent feature. But I agree with Morbid in that adding lots of extra 'faking' elements to the material would make it worse, not better.

[fuzzpopfx]

Before you read all this, let me say this: THe Vray Proxy system is freaking badass! I love the algorithmic concept behind it! Now, I list grievances against VRay and how VRay is missing out. (not just bitching about vray ) Read on!

Thanks for the comments guys. Regarding user learning curve, I've observed patterns opposites of what some people are claiming. Cite the comment I first made. In two different studios I've been, every artist failed to understand how the color swatch for the Reflection and Refraction slots actually changes behavior based on whether or not the fresnel box is checked. I've run into countless situations where users were defining physically unrealistic vray materials because they would set the fresnel settings to a somewhat arbitrary value and then try to adjust the reflection intensity based strictly on changing the color swatch when its behaving as a mask. And in the cases of artists who had worked both with Brazil and Vray, they all claimed Brazil materials seemed easier to work with.

You would think that vray materials would have been cited as easier. My experience from the userbase I've worked with is that most people are more confused and in the dark about vray materials than alternatives that offer more features. Its not really the feature count that's confusing. Its the way vray presents them.

Regarding physical correctness: the best model isn't necessarily the most physically correct model. A simpler model that is easier to control and still produces realistic results is often preferred. This is where I've seen vray stumble. Take the VRay camera for example. They call it the "Physical Cam". It does NOT offer a rectalinear lens (the same distortion shape used in max cam and nearly every video game). As a result, if you want to get the handy exposure controls of the physical camera, your entire shot must then be rendered from a physical camera. You can't match any rendered passes to passes from a max cam. And having the ability to render with a rectalinear lens is not even a feature you should have to ask for. In fact, it *should* have been an automatic default when the vray camera was first conceptualized. I can't concieve in my mind of why a wise developer would say "Lets NOT make this rudimentary math function available. Instead lets force a more complex function to be the only option."

VRay is supposed to be physically accurate? Then why are vray lights set to show in reflections by default with their specular box turned on. All they do is show up as a solid white box object with a bright intensity. It behaves like an ordinary white card. Real lights don't look like whitecards. They look like lights. The more physically precise way to simulate lights is to create a texture that looks like a light with its bloom and flare and then map it to a plane and place it inthe scene where your light is.

I've noticed a few vray fans out there claim that vray is amazingly physically accurate and you shouldn't be using it otherwise or else "you're using it wrong." THe fact is that this physical accuracy is a nuisance for the programmers to have to maintain because of small oversights. And why go through all that headache of trying ot make the precision perfect when there are simpler mathematical models that allow artists to easily achieve just what they want.

Apologies: Why can I make this case without thinking that I'm just complaining about VRay? Because the VRay Proxy is freaking badass!! The proxy system alone could have set Chaos Group MILES ahead of the competition in all studios. But instead they are missing out on some of the market because V-Ray falls down in basic areas that have been so elegantly offered in other packages.

To be honest, I think some of the unified architecture hurts them (granted some of its good). Id Software suffered similarly with the unified architecture in the Doom 3 Engine. There's a reason the small handful of games out there based on Doom 3 all look the same with the wacky point lighting. The unified architecture prevented users from going outside the box.

[jujubee]

Well - all renderers and host applications have their weaknesses. Most of the very high-end users (Morbid?) claim that Maya is leaps above Max. That being said, Vray was built for Max and Max itself has some inherent challenges.

The other thing to keep in mind is that Vray for all intents and purposes is VERY fast. There's a reason why 99% of all studios (perhaps even more) won't use Maxwell or Fryrender in production.

The materials for me are complicated as well once you get into very advance materials, but at the lower end of complexion, they are highly optimizable.

Ideally, I wish the materials were as easy as Maxwell materials once were - just pick and choose (presets.) I haven't used Fryrender so I can't talk for that. Fortunately, most of us save Vray libraries for this reason.

To me, the Vray Materials were a lot easier to learn than the rendering parameters. Most of the time with Vray mats, I either pull from my library. At most I usually only change a few values and they serve their purpose.

Anyways, there's a lot more power to Vray than those that barely know the program realize. The biggest strength in my opinion is probably it's overall speed and accuracy.

And why go through all that headache of trying ot make the precision perfect when there are simpler mathematical models that allow artists to easily achieve just what they want.

Art you talking for artwork or workart? For work, (workart - I just invented this word by the way), Vray has speed for short deadlines. You can make materials highly optimized.

For artwork (no deadlines) there are applications which are less confusing, but most of them are painfullly slow and introduce other artifacts such as noise.

It's all a compromise at the moment between speed and accuracy - one day photorealistic renderers will converge.

[glorybound]

V-Ray

It is pretty simple... people migrate to v-ray because they see images created in v-ray. 9 out of 10 great works were created using v-ray so the developers are doing something right.

[fuzzpopfx]

Some good points jujubee! I like the artwork versus workart bit.

[fuzzpopfx]

After speaking with some old friends, I was just informed that Brazil and even mental ray respect instanced geometry in a lightweight scene grid giving you the ability to render billions of polies without having to proxy stuff. How this knowledge eluded me, I don't know -- i guess cuz i've been stuck among vray users. Now I'm back to the same place I was before -- wondering why I would ever want to use vray. Hahahahaha!!!!!

[Aldaryn]

Funny thing is, that with the current VRay shader system you can reproduce those Brazil features you've been talking about in the op...

It's all about how you use the tools you've got on your hands, not about how hard you rant...

Best regards,
A.

[victor.nsy]

As always said ... it's not just the tool it's the artist. Tools must be design to not hinder
creativity. Who wants to spend hours figuring out how to use a tool compared to getting
creative with one that offers essential options.

If you find vray shallow ... well get creative with it! there are so much more with less.

Remember LESS IS MORE!

[Morbid Angel]

Most of the very high-end users (Morbid?) claim that Maya is leaps above Max.

Well I never claimed that.
And I would say this:
You have to realize that vray came out at a time when other renderers were weak in areas where vray was strong: fast gi, fast true 3d motion blur, very good options for displacement.
This was a very good point, at that time, brazil lacked fast gi options, it had no form of displacement, it had no 3d motion blur. Yes it had good shader system...but it had these other major draw backs.
Mental ray had its own issues back then, it was hard to use, it was very unintuitive, also very slow. Very little info about it, complex shaders.

But things have changed over the years. Mental ray has progressed a lot. Its significantly faster, I would say in the right hands, its on par with vray in almost every aspect exept few. And of course being copied from vray its going to get only better (new gi method is in works to mimic vrays light cache system)

Brazil has released version 2.0 with completely reworked system (thought I havent used it so I dont know what its advantages are) I do know that its very buggy and doubdt its production readiness.

Vray has progressed a lot as well. This being said, its probably a lot slower renderer then ver 1.09 we all used to love.
But where 1.09 failed, 1.5 wins: render buffer passes, strong gi architecture, solid system for stable renderings.
I dont think even today nor brazil no mr can offer such things in an "out of the box" packedge.

About maya being over max, this has been also true some years ago.
However autodesk is dedicating more resources towards max nowadays. Maya is progressing but its at a point where there is no real reason to chose max over maya or vise-versa. They both have their advantages/disadvantages.

Ultimatly, you have to spend the time testing each renderer, determine why each one is good for you, why its not good, and make a pick. Often a good idea is to use 2 renderers in production, one to compinsate for weaknesses of the other.

[vlado]

After speaking with some old friends, I was just informed that Brazil and even mental ray respect instanced geometry in a lightweight scene grid giving you the ability to render billions of polies without having to proxy stuff.

V-Ray 1.5 does this automatically as well, so there is less need for proxy objects, if instancing is all you are going to use them for. Nevertheless, seeing as how other renderers that you mentioned have now added proxy objects means that there is some merit to the idea People may try to convince you that proxy files is the same as instancing, but this is not true. For example, the whole instancing in the world will not help you export 20 million faces of super-detalied mesh out of zbrush and render them inside of 3ds Max, but you can do that with a .vrmesh file.

Best regards,
Vlado

[jujubee]

@Morbid - I wasn't implying you for saying that - just trying to get your opinion as I trust what you have to say. :P

@OP - I think Mental Ray stole a lot of ideas/setup from Vray 1.5 (pre-final.) I remember when they previewed MR at Siggraph two years ago - it looked so remarkably similar to Vray - Autodesk passed some of their features off as something 'new' (in particular their sun/sky system.) I'd be pretty upset if I was working at Chaos and saw this happening. Autodesk should be really ashamed of themselves for essentially robbing 3rd party developers.

MR was at one point very confusing - I remember trying their tutorial long ago and couldn't understand what I was doing. Vray rendered awesome images in comparison right out of the package. Hence, I switched over and have been a strong supporter ever since. Chaos has been very flexible in providing us with bug fixes and enhancements - something you probably will not find out of any other package.

I hope with future Vray development, that their betas are kept VERY closed so that these other companies cannot and do not steal ideas from the hard work of the Chaos development team - also including some of the brilliant suggestions of the members of this forum. The beta leaks I believe really hurt. A highly closed beta for the next substantial upgrade will probably secure Vray a solid/leading edge over its competitors.

Getting back to your original post - I think it's very healthy to question why one should use one package over another. But I wouldn't put Vray down. If you really don't like it, you can use/learn another package then (and I speak for myself - no one else.) I'm sure there's benefits to all of them. But please remember, a lot of those ideas found in other renderers come from Vray and will continue to do so.