New Physical camera its a mess.

[tzaar]

I based it on an image that I believe comes from x-rite (formerly gretagmacbeth) Had to reverse image search to find it again: http://i57.tinypic.com/14318c2.png

I'm a bit worried about copyright infringement since I built it to sort of look like the original thing. But I put it here for 30-days on my dropbox now:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1poxm1s0ub..._2014.max?dl=0



It's only got the regular side. Not the special one with warm and cold grayscales for tweaking white balance.

The more I look into this though, the more varying and complex information I find. I'm not sure that entering those values into vray materials will correspond to how much light they physical samples reflect in real life. Or that this was a sane thing to do. But I just had to give it a go and I think I got a pretty nice setup out of it. I have a vray sun an old hdri from dosch that I tweaked to render all those samples as close as possible. So it's definitely a bright sunny day, but all colors are rendered very nicely without casts. Most of the old dosch skies are very magenta tinted.

[Macker]

[tzaar]

haha, well I really hate sounding like some... hater. And now after some fiddling I don't think I mind the camera as much as I mind that the new exposure control doesn't allow for white balance in non-physical cameras and perspective/user views. So no more orto rendering with white balance, unless one switches back to the old vray exposure control which overrides the new cameras. Which is why I wondered if that control will be deprecated in coming releases? Or if one could keep using it, only it would be updated to work with the new physical camera, so we wouldn't have to use the Physical Camera Exposure Control.

I'm just wondering. And since I don't know how much chaos group can affect the way the new Physical Camera Exposure Control works I'm just throwing this question/idea out here.

[vlado]

Well, I was told that the physical exposure will eventually get a white balance option. Not sure what happened with that, I will ask again, but feel free to also report a defect for 3ds Max.

Best regards,
Vlado

[tzaar]

Thanks, I did that now!
For now we'll use the vray phys cam and vray exposure control.

Cheers

[GLASS-CANVAS]

My tip for making it more managable is add the Physical Camera Exposure Control in your MaxStart.max file with the settings you require. Saves you from ever needing to do it again.

[Streetwise]

Thank you tzaar! Looks really nice. Certainly a nice reference tool to be sure!

[WilleViz]

+1

I also prefer Max 2016 over previous versions, so I'm clearly a nut-case!

[olika]

Hmm first i thought i get it but then....

How you guys do it?

Create camera. Let the rest of settings in the exposure control at it`s default?
So the "physical camera exposure control" is active, not the vray expsoure control, right?
What does the image control? Is it color mapping again? Leave it alone with default settings?
Physical scale setting?

Then just play with the Exposure Gain in the camera setting?
As i see so far, i have some issues regarding the Lenseffectsource Pass.
I have to set Exposure Gain Target to about a EV of 9 to somehow have a similar looking Lenseffectsource Pass compared to the render in terms of exposure.
Does that make sense?
I´m quite unsure of what i`m doing right now (lost!) to keep a correct workflow.

[Macker]

I don't use EV's, I just set the ISO to 100 and the shutter speed to 1/300th second (Based on a normal, sunny VRay sun being used). Works exactly the same as the previous implimentation.

Don't worry about the lenseffectsource pass. You're exposing for your RGB/beauty pass.

[Jiri.Matys]

I do the same - use ISO and shutter speed and everything works great.

[Joezeta]

Why is that image control curve squashing my higlights, bumping shadows and so interfering with my vray linear mapping? Is there a way to avoid it?

[Joelaff]

It's great we finally get a decent DOF preview, but why can't we have motion blur as well? Also, why REMOVE multi-pass from the new camera? It was sometimes useful.

[^Lele^]

It's rather a case of Autodesk ADDING the multi-pass code (ie. their own) to the physcam one (ie. ours), not the other way around.
There may be reasons why they decided against it that I surely am not privy to, but can think of (f.e. moving DoF and Moblur preview to the active viewport controls, rather than per camera. Just messing about here.), or it may just have been a case of old code not being compatible (you'll notice how the new preview does multipass anyways, just differently), while the new one for Moblur wasn't active yet.
Work on max 2017 is progressing at steady pace, i wouldn't rule out (but don't know of any in particular, first-hand) some changes in this department in the coming release(s).

[Joelaff]

I would have hoped that AD would have added the multi-pass in, since the new Physical Cam is supposed to be an AD thing now, and the existing AD camera had multi-pass. The biggest drawback is the lack of motion blur in animation previews. I guess it will be more camera shuffling back and forth between types.