Considering V-Ray for VFX

[cpnichols]

Thanks guys, I thought thats what unclamped colors ment, How does that apply in production? Ex: If using levels in photoshop, the whites of the lightbulb will stay white, but the wall, would change?(referencing cpnichols example, and using a 16bit photo)

Photoshop does not really support unclamped colors. Compositing does. Shake, Nuke, etc... I think AfterEffects may, not sure.

But I may be wrong about Photoshop, since I think the new version supports the Canon RAW format which is HDR and unclamped. The 16bit color of the old version was a joke.

If you work in film. Film is usually printed in unclamped color. You have a much higher dynamic range for film then you do for your monitor. Cineon was the format of choice at 10 bits, but now I have a feeling that EXR will take over.

[SMH]

Re: A conversation at Siggraph

At Siggraph I was standing at the V-ray booth and got talking to a guy who worked for an animation company up in Oregon. He is a lightwave user - the company did all those M&M commercials. Anyway he was changing platform and wasn't sure whether to go for Maya or 3ds (he had experience with both). I quizzed him on this and he said the availability of Vray was what was going to steer his software choice - for him it was the single most important part of his decision. Not a bad testiment to Vray.

Don't know if this helps in your're decision but it makes a nice story for Vray users.

Adam H. Stewart

It does indeed, since I personally come from a LW background. LW is a great tool at heart, but it's slow development over the years, meant it could not keep up with rest of the industry. The ever tightening deadlines we have to cope with everyday, dictate the nature of our production pipelines. Not everyone can afford hundreds of render nodes, to simply deliver a commercial or an FX shot on time. Creative solutions like multipass rendering, became mandatory for some. Even large studios value the flexibility of this method. LW allows for multipass rendering, but in a very limited, almost crude way. I find it a great shame, since it has a great -albeit very slow- 320Bit rendering core, that should be able to export enough "unclamped" pixel data to suite any pipeline. Even Newtek's close partnership with Eyeon of Digital Fusion fame, couldn't bring LW a robust pipe to Fusion or DFX+.

This is why we chose to look to a more dynamic platform, where developers listen and keep us ahead. For us, Maya looks like a solid platform choice, now that Alias is finally an independent player. The future as we see it, is one where production pieplines are assembled around big packages like Maya, which become almost like 3D operating systems. Maya is already becoming a hub that everyone wants to link with. Alias was smart enough to acquire Kaydara, and perhaps more importantly it's FBX format which has become an industry standard interchange format. It all goes to serve it's position as a focus point, for studios and independent developers like Chaos, Splutterfish...folks in other disciplines like Luxology (Modo). Even Apple wants Shake to play nice with Maya.

BTW Shake, Nuke and Fusion all work with upto 32bits per component for a total bit depth of 128Bits (96bits+Alpha). Fusion can actually handle LW's (.Flx) files natively, but it really stops there as there is no reliable way to create a production ready mutipass pipe between the two.

Anyway, It's good to hear about the upcoming developments in Vray1.5. Again we really look forward to the Maya integration. And we hope to see a strong multipass implementation to complement it.


Thanks everyone,

S.M Hassani