Ideas on making V-Ray's sampling UI more intuitive.

[Neilg]

better for beginners than "Demystifying V-Ray DMC Sampler".

Probably is but that's not what I was talking about.

[piotrus3333]

you know all that stuff and you are able to explain it to somebody in a matter of hours. shure. thats great. ideal.
but than imagine somebody without that opportunity.

[RockinAkin]

Just to reiterate - this isn't about what settings are ideal for good renders / beginners, or which settings are important and which should be ignored.

The goal should be to have ONE streamlined UI that presents beginners and experts with an intuitive and user-friendly experience to control V-Ray's sampling.
Possibly the most important consideration in building this UI is that it does everything it can to ease the transition from beginner to expert.

So to elaborate the Basic / Advanced mode idea:

Basic mode could hide all sampling controls and be left up to Vlado and the team to optimize as they see fit with each version of V-Ray. Possibly only Noise Threshold and Time Limit remains exposed and constant to the user, with a few additional options like Bucket or Progressive rendering. This way new users can easily start in V-Ray, hit render, and get a good looking image quickly without getting bogged down in the sampling parameters.

Advanced mode would reveal sampling controls, but still present them in a way that would be easy for a user to transition from Basic level to Expert level in a day's worth of learning. This allows people that want to become more advanced users of V-Ray to easily transition once the time is right. Again, intuitive design is key to making advanced mode easy to use and understand - without having to read countless forum posts or tutorials. I believe this IS possible.

[Neilg]

piotrus, you're not actually reading my posts are you?
we tell them 'use the default settings with reflection, raw light, sample rate pass. if there is noise on an object, or light, raise the subdivisions on it. ' and after a few hours they know how to use vray. we dont teach them vray, we just tell them to only use a couple of controls and ignore the rest. controls with a very clear logic to them and one question to ask when looking at the passes (is this object/light/edge noisy)

[glorybound]

The terminology used in V-Ray, or any high end render engine for that matter, is not intuitive. Intuitive is low quality, medium quality, and high quality. I think a good manual, with tutorials by the developers, would be the best way to educate the user. Here, we have the software developers in total disagreement with power users on some workflows, which makes my head spin. It's almost like V-Ray has become a religion!

[devin]

It's almost like V-Ray has become a religion!

Amen....like I said before I think the power users take pride in the fact they've expertly figured out all of Vray's secret incantations, not all of us can do this or want to. I'm fine with letting Vlado decide what sample levels are appropriate, a basic/advanced setup sounds very good to me.

[RockinAkin]

The terminology used in V-Ray, or any high end render engine for that matter, is not intuitive.

And it doesn't have to be that way. I believe my mock-up on the first page proves it.

Intuitive means that when you increase/decrease a sampling value - the sampling of that aspect of your scene increases/decreases predictably. This is not how V-Ray behaves right now.

There is undoubtedly room for improvement.
And with the introduction of a carefully designed and balanced Basic / Advanced UI - an intuitive V-Ray user experience IS possible.

[piotrus3333]

@ RockinAkin
I understand your idea. the original one and all iterations. It's great. would be nice to have it this way.
But it simply ain't gonna happen in foreseeable future according to Vlado for a lot of reasons.
I'm just trying to show that basic and advance mode is already there in 3.0. sort of at least.

@ Neilg
and after that you have well train employees. I'm simply proposing a form of "quick start" based on vray quick settings. something for complete noobs.

[vlado]

I understand your idea. the original one and all iterations. It's great. would be nice to have it this way. But it simply ain't gonna happen in foreseeable future according to Vlado for a lot of reasons.

Ah, well just because I have all these reasons doesn't mean I'm not thinking about it We'll see how things go.

Best regards,
Vlado

[piotrus3333]

Ah, well just because I have all these reasons doesn't mean I'm not thinking about it We'll see how things go.

would it be a lot of work squeezing image sampler noise, time for progressive and embree into quick settings? or just changing defaults applied by presets to 0.005 (to match dmc)?

[vlado]

We can do that; the quick settings are a bit modified for newer builds and there is a way to set up default values for other things like Embree.

Best regards,
Vlado

[piotrus3333]

voila!
and here is your "basic mode" guys, coming soon.

[hoppergrass]

If you want to see how a slider system should not be done, then look at the mentalray implementation into Revit. it looks super simple, push the slider around to get the desired quality, nice . That is until you start using the high quality settings and suffer extreme render times for poor images.

The high setting just dont make sense and are often over kill. With a bit of tinkering under the hood you could get mach better quality for less time, which many users never realize they can do.

[Nicinus]

Hate to bring up SolidRocks yet again, but they have ONE slider with five steps: draft, low, medium, good and production. It basically controls everything and adapts to resolution, etc.