Vray future predictions ?

[stevesideas]

Anyone hazard a guess as to the type of features we can expect to have in the future with the Corona team on-board ?

[vlado]

There are a number of things that we are looking into together with the RL team:

*) We've compared the UHD cache and the light cache. It is difficult to say that one is better than the other as a concept (both have some drawbacks), but we can definitely make some improvements to the light cache to make it faster and to reduce flickering in certain situations.

*) We've compared the adaptive lights in V-Ray versus the new hierarchical solver in Corona. For this purpose I did an internal build of Corona that has an implementation of V-Ray's adaptive lights. While the hierarchical solver in Corona is generally better, it is also a lot more complicated and some issues need to be ironed out. It is also not suitable for a GPU implementation. The V-Ray adaptive lights on the other hand are somewhat noisier, but the algorithm is much simpler. Maybe there are ways to combine the two techniques, we'll see.

*) We are comparing the two denoisers and hopefully we can improve the results of the V-Ray denoiser for the cases of depth of field and motion blur.

*) I'm hoping that we can work together with the RL team on more efficient volume rendering.

Some other things are not related to Corona, but might be interesting anyways:

*) We are focused on a much-needed update of the V-Ray SDK. Some code has accumulated over the years and due to the need to keep the V-Ray 3.x SDK compatible, certain things were not implemented in an optimal way. We have also made much greater use of SSE instructions and made the code base more modern. This is not terribly exciting on the outside for users, but at least it does give us a few percent speed improvement.

*) We've been also researching more efficient HDR lighting for interior scenes. A side effect is that V-Ray can figure out by itself where the environment light is coming from for interior scenes giving us more than 2x speed improvement in some cases. This will allow us to get rid of the light portals and the need to put lights at windows. Some preliminary results are here:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+Vladimi...ts/gkYUQb25Fvk

*) The distance texture is significantly faster; in some extreme cases up to 10x faster than before.

*) We can denoise various render elements in addition to the main RGB image. The difference from other solutions (including Corona) is that we do this in a way that allows the denoised elements to be perfectly composited to the denoised RGB.

*) There is a new hair material. It is based on the same paper as the Corona hair material so the two look very similar, even though they were implemented by different people independently. We are also looking to add more accurate glints, but we'll see how that goes.

*) There is a new frame buffer implementation underway, based entirely on Qt.

*) Lots of GPU improvements.

There's also other stuff, but we'll get to that later.

Best regards,
Vlado

[gandhics]

!!!!!!!! *) I'm hoping that we can work together with the RL team on more efficient volume rendering

[nick_martin]

Sounds awesome Vlado! Any clues as to when the next big release implementing some of these features will be? Days? Weeks? Months?

The HDR lighting improvements for interior scenes sounds particularly exciting!

[kosso_olli]

Wow, that sounds great! The comparison images for the HDR lighting look very promising.
Vlado, did you take a look at their lens effects? Are they any better or faster then the ones from V-Ray? Also, I still think their HDRI ground projection feature is very well thought-out and executed.

[vlado]

Vlado, did you take a look at their lens effects? Are they any better or faster then the ones from V-Ray?

We haven't looked into that yet, although it's on the "to do" list. There are some improvements that we did a while back on our own, and I want to finish those first.

Also, I still think their HDRI ground projection feature is very well thought-out and executed.

We discussed it briefly, however I want to go a step further and allow the dome to be scaled along one axis (f.e. if you want to do a street or a long road). This is easy to do with the dome light in the viewports, but since Corona only has environment slot, they didn't include this possibility. I will probably end up moving the ground projection from VRayHDRI to the dome light itself for better control.

Best regards,
Vlado

[kosso_olli]

That sounds even better, I am excited!

[rikou]

Thank you for all this great information !

[stevesideas]

Thanks for the info. It all sounds great. I'm also keen to know about improved colour correction, use of colour profiles and bloom/glow etc. Will there be any more advanced controls for these effects ?

[vlado]

While I don't have anything specific on this yet, the vfb2 framework will allow us to experiment with and implement such things faster.

Best regards,
Vlado

[gadzooks]

Vlado what about the exchange of materials between both engines. Will Vray be able to use Corona materials in the near future? Also if memory serves me wright didn't ILM introduce a Proposed standardized material exchange format at Siggraph this year? Is that something you guy's are interested in implementing at some point?
Thanks

[vlado]

Will Vray be able to use Corona materials in the near future?

Yes, something will render out.

Also if memory serves me wright didn't ILM introduce a Proposed standardized material exchange format at Siggraph this year? Is that something you guy's are interested in implementing at some point?

I'm not sure yet. As usual, ILM wrote it for their pipeline and for their specific use cases and it's not exactly what we need. I know that Autodesk is a part of that initiative so maybe they will solve it at the application level.

Best regards,
Vlado

[nikand]

Sounds great!
Hope rt gpu will support phoneix fd volumetrics

[vlado]

Sounds great!
Hope rt gpu will support phoneix fd volumetrics

https://youtube.com/watch?v=MtIGqMZmTk4

Best regards,
Vlado

[FLP]

My 2cents of what I would love to see happen.

A unified frame buffer: Same UI, features and functionality from both Vray & Corona
A unified Distributed Rendering Platform: To be able to activated, manage, monitor nodes for both Vray & Corona. Outside of Max is preferable.
A unified Licence management: I hate managing licenses, it would be cool if both engines had "one place to manage them all"

So you get where i'm going with this. Both engines are awesome in there own way & I would love to be able to seamlessly switch between both depending on the task. Anything that can free me of management tasks and allow me to focus on creative tasks would be great.

Cheers!