Quick 3.3 Report....

[vlado]

I'm uploading the whole scene. It will take a while since it's huge.

Thanks a lot for the scene! The issue seems to be in the particular color mapping settings ("subpixel mapping" enabled, "clamp output" enabled, mode set to apply both "color mapping and gamma"). The new adaptive image algorithm doesn't seem to work well in that case - it was designed to work with "subpixel mapping" disabled.

Will see what can be done about it, but in the meantime you will get less noisy results if you disable the "subpixel mapping" option.

Best regards,
Vlado

[^Lele^]

Will see what can be done about it, but in the meantime you will get less noisy results if you disable the "subpixel mapping" option.

Actually, it's enough to make the noise threshold very small, and V-Ray will behave normally again (as i mentioned in another thread.).

This is because, Max, with these colormapping settings, the pixels lack variance (there aren't any big contrast makers anymore, as the colormapping squishes them before the sampler can get a hold of them, so to speak.), the new sampler is called "variance based", and so it lacks a solid base to work on.
Without going into the maths, Variance simply can be thought of as "amount of difference", unit-less, in our case of measured from the samples' intensity value, between samples/pixels (NT of 1.0 = 100% variance, 0.01=1% variance, and so on).
As the values get squeezed together, their variance gets smaller , and one has to correspondingly instruct V-Ray to be more sensitive to subtler changes.

As i said in the other post, in your samplerate pass, a good clue would be that you have seas of blue.
If you follow the cheatsheet to the letter, that means you should lower NT.
You will notice i did not focus one bit on the actual NT value, but rather a samplerate RE look, and that is precisely because with these types of non-linear colormappings, the numbers become very small for noise threshold, well below what one would have used in SP2.

The very good news is that it doesn't matter what your colormappings, or NT values, are anymore: if your samplerate looks right, you will be getting the best speed for that cleanliness.
The other bit of very good news, it's worth iterating for all those which had to resort to colormapping tricks in the past (i am one of them.), is that those are not really needed anymore.

You will find that the new sampler is much, much better at handling high intensities and strong contrast areas than the old ever was: it was designed to be so by Vlado, and it was never a trivial task to begin with.
Give it a chance (reset to defaults, do no touch the colormapping section.), and please report in your results.

[NicoC]

Hello,

Maybe it's not the best place to discuss about default settings, but I've seen "Quick 3.3 report" and I jumped in
Just a thought about new defaults, I'm a bit confused: I've just loaded 3dsmax, with our custom maxstart (and then, custom VRay default settings), switched production renderer to scanline and then back to VRay ... to see that GI is OFF, Probabilistic Lights ON, Max Intensity ON, Filter maps for GI is ON (was previously OFF, as stated in the manual), GI Filter Multiplier to 5.0 (why ?) ... that seems weird to me. Can we expect a complete guide for this new (and it seems major) release ?

Thanks in advance for any explanations ...

[mrhalaby]

wow.. I took a 3.2 scene with render time of 1 hour 15 minutes (production quality, with Ornatrix fur), rendered straight with 3.3 without any change in config and it was only 8 minutes O_O

ms 6
min 1 max 8
clr T 0.012

There´s a very noticeable general change in the lighting towards red, but the noise levels are pretty much the same. I guess that means my old scene was really oversampled?

In another arch viz example, the render went from 55 to 43 min, again changed lighting towards red, but nothing that can't be fixed in comp.

Nice one team!

[king_max]

Thanks a lot for the scene! The issue seems to be in the particular color mapping settings ("subpixel mapping" enabled, "clamp output" enabled, mode set to apply both "color mapping and gamma"). The new adaptive image algorithm doesn't seem to work well in that case - it was designed to work with "subpixel mapping" disabled.

Will see what can be done about it, but in the meantime you will get less noisy results if you disable the "subpixel mapping" option.

Best regards,
Vlado

Thank you for looking into the matter. As soon as I get some free time, I'll try some scenes/renders.

[mrhalaby]

So just to confirm how we should work with vray from now on:

Light subdivs, reflection, refraction samples are not as important anymore, but my guess is that they should be high enough so that the adaptive sampler takes care of reducing samples?

min shading rate (MSR) is optimal at 6-7 and should very rarely be changed

only max subdivs and Color threshold in the adaptive image sampler need to be adjusted to get rid of the noise.

is that correct?

[Mokiki]

Almost everything correct except the part about light subdivs etc. You don't need to touch those anymore with the new method. By default they are even ignored unless you activate "Use Local subdivs" under the Global DMC rollout.

[NicoC]

Hello,

IMO, a comprehensive guide about the new workflow allowed but v3.3 would be awesome. As I stated a few posts earlier, I personnally feel a bit lost: resetting VRay settings (switching renderer to scanline and then back to VRay) doesn't seem to work properly here and somehow messed a bit with the settings (see my previous post).

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Re-setting V-Ray settings actually works properly, however render-settings in V-Ray 3.3x.xx has been updated, this is documented in the ChangeLog.txt file.
Unfortunately at this point we do not have a comprehensive guide what exactly has changed although such list could be extracted fairly easy with the new VFB-feature Compare Settings.

A very informative information about the changes in the latest update could be found in the thread bellow:
http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthr...download/page6

[NicoC]

Re-settings V-Ray settings actually works properly, however render-settings in V-Ray 3.3x.xx has been updated, this is documented in the ChangeLog.txt file.
Unfortunately at this point we do not have a comprehensive guide what exactly has changed although such list could be extracted fairly easy with the new VFB-feature Compare Settings.

A very informative information about the changes in the latest update could be found in the thread bellow:
http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthr...download/page6

Ok, thank you.

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Here are the changes in the settings between 3.30.03(left column) and 3.20.03(right) and Compare V-Ray Settings feature in action

[NicoC]

Thank you again, Svetlozar :
One setting remains obscure to me: Filter Maps for GI (and its multiplier). The manual describes it as:

Filter maps for GI – enable or disable texture filtering during GI calculations and glossy reflections/refractions. When off (the default), texture maps are not filtered for GI and glossy reflections/refractions in order to speed up the calculations. If this option is on, textures will be filtered in these cases.

I mean, it's off by default, for speed apparently. So why would we set it on ? what does the multiplier really do ? why is it on by default ? why is the multiplier set to 5.0 by default ?

Thanks.

[bernhard]

Hmm.. confused now... here is a 5 Minute short Video in which I try to explain what I don't understand:
https://youtu.be/eUBDORHdOHc

Thx for any little help,
appreciate it !

[Morne]

Hmm.. confused now... here is a 5 Minute short Video in which I try to explain what I don't understand:
https://youtu.be/eUBDORHdOHc

Thx for any little help,
appreciate it !

Hi Bernard. Leave the defaults so VRAY does the auto subdivs. Then as far as I understand, we're not suppose to be using the noise threshold anymore and a default of 0.005 is good for most things. I won't be suprised if the noise threashold is removed in future versions (from the UI at least)
EVERYTHING is now controlled with the color threshold. So leave noise on default 0.005 and try lowering the color to 0.005 or even lower maybe 0.003 and see what you get. Let us know. You can also lower your max AA (from the 128 you have) until you start seeing red on the EDGES of objects. If there's RED anywhere else but the edges, like for example the middle surface of an object, then you've lowered your MAX AA too much

EDIT: they've changed the way subdivs and noise work with the latest version 3.3

[munderwood]

This is a video that Vlado made for 3.2, which from what I can tell is very similar to the default workflow for 3.3. You basically control the quality of your scene with 3 settings: min/max subdivs in the sampler, color threshold and, minimum shading rate. In your video your are using clean mostly flat surfaces, as Vlado mentions, you need to up you MSR to clean up some of that noise without going overboard on them color threshold.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKaKvWqTFlw

Hmm.. confused now... here is a 5 Minute short Video in which I try to explain what I don't understand:
https://youtu.be/eUBDORHdOHc

Thx for any little help,
appreciate it !