just some minor teething problems since returning to vray

[paulison]

I've just started using vray again after many years (employer finally purchased a current copy for me) and have some issues overcoming the differences between my original scenes and the new versions of max+vray. I don't even know what the originals were done in anymore - they were ancient though, so version1.5 most likely. This is bringing back memories though of the original, extremely steep learning curve i remember from years ago....and the issues. Here is a short list of pretty vague issues i'm having:

1. i've adjusted an old scene to overcome some noise and other issues and this rendering time is balooning out to 20 hours (was 4 hours)
2. I've noticed several of the old materials either look more shiney or desaturated than before - which has forced me to look for new materials. this metallic variable and other changes are a bit confusing to me?
3. My window frames, car paint and shadows cast by trees on the foreground all look quite grainy to me, which led me to change some settings - not sure if its the max subdivs or noise threshold on the image sampler? it all operates very differently now to what i remember
4. in the past my interior lights would need a multiplier of say 50-100 but now i'm having to set them to 1000 just to be visible, and i still cant see my IES downlights. surely your standardy light brightness should be around 1x ?
5. I've had to set a separate Vray sky with different settings to my environment maps because it was rendering out extremely bright white - previously this was a nice blue gradient. shouldnt it generate a suitable background map linked to this? it seems to work quite differently now

Honestly i'm feeling a bit demoralised - thinking the return would lead to quicker images and a bit easier to negotiate, i find myself confused with the old job setups and converting to a current setup. Maybe i'd be better off starting the lighting and camera's from scratch with a template?

I know it's just a part of the learning process but i was getting better images out of twinmotion which is probably the easiest bit of software i've ever used. I know there is a massive theoretical difference in quality and that it's going to be harder.

Or am i just an idiot?. Maybe vray needs an idiot mode for architects and people who have not touched vray for many years . Ideally i would like this kind of scenario: "Here is my crappy ArchiCAD model with excessive geomoetry....*click button*, automatically good setup with quick renders "

Another thing I REALLY loved about twinmotion - the direct link to the model meant i could set up my rendering and it would link to archiCAD and update the geomoetry with one click. At the moment i have to export the amended geometry as a separate 3ds file, bring it in and attempt to delete the obsolete geometry manually.

vray Next for idiots please

[^Lele^]

Paul, hey.

So, there's been a major paradigm shift after V-Ray 3.3, when the unified sampling was introduced.
For the render settings, all you should need to do is reset them (Switch to Scanline and back to V-Ray), and you should be good to go.
This is because a lot of work has gone on to make V-Ray more aware of what is being rendered, and it's now able to adjust itself with about as optimal an efficiency as possible.
This should cover points 1, 3 and help with 4 and 5.

For shaders, there have been changes, but running a v-ray scene conversion (on the right mouse menu in max) should fix most of the issues you're facing. Should it not, please send a scene to support so we may study the causes. (points 2 and possibly 3).

For 4 and 5 it would look like you have rogue exposure or multipliers somewhere.
Try maybe starting with a fresh scene to find your bearings, and see if those bits work fine there first.

As for live linking, that's something you should probably ask Autodesk: we do not currently develop DCC applications.

You're welcome to send support a scene to be looked into, referencing this thread, in any case.

[piotrus3333]

reset to default settings of VRay Next. control quality with image samples' noise threshold. probably do not touch anything else. give the denoiser a try or two.
merge old scenes into newly made files, run VRay scene converter. start with VRaySun/Sky. tonemapping in "exposure" section on vfb adjustments for now.
read about pbr to get your shaders up to speed.

[paulison]

Thanks guys. I didn't even think of switching to scanline and back or resetting the defaults. some of my old settings just be extremely incompatible. Also, from reading elsewhere my scenes originate from a period where the irradiance map was used for primary bounces so I think that may have been causing some blotchiness on another job. I have to rethink the methods used as well as people are saying brute force is pretty good these days for detailed scenes.

My old job was rendering over night - 20 hours +, then it bombed out on my rendering machine and restarted the job on the manager which meant my other queue of test renders didn't proceed.

I will try all of these things out and just render at a lower resolution until I learn the changes.

One last problem i forgot to mention - in these old jobs i keep getting a phantom vray sun light which will be added to the scene every time i close max and re-open. hopefully the conversion will resolve this. It's probably also the source of my extremely bright background as well i would be guessing.

Essentially though, the pupose is to revive some very old jobs for our folio. As they are not current i may be able to upload one scene here, but i wont do that unless the suggestions above still dont work.

Thanks again. Damn those simple answers which are so obvious that I overlooked them!!!

As for the direct link, well I don't expect one as Autodesk hate ArchiCAD so while they may develop support for this for Revit, there is no way they would do it for ArchiCAD. Kind of unfortunate that I have to use some dated file import method just because of various corporate interests restricting what is possible. I just thought that something could be implemented via vray using a similar system to vrmesh where the live link could be via the external file and plugin to ArchiCAD, bypassing Max. To be honest, I mostly only use max as a platform for rendering - it's horrible bloatware imho. Menu's are all over the place and it's bloody expensive for what it is. I also find it unstable, slow and the quality of the preview window is atrocious. Just my 2c. If I could completely avoid Autodesk I would tbh. In twinmotion they managed to have a realistic preview window of the images where you could adjust things in real time. If only there was something similar in max/vray...IPR does go some of the way to addressing this limitation though so I am really enjoying this.

[paulison]

ok trying these methods out on this old scene just resulted in a complete reset to defaults which forces a redo of everything - I guess I was hoping to avoid this and that it would translate a little more intelligently. For example - No GI environment or refraction maps in place? It's not really that different to just starting a new scene. It didn't even keep rendering methods or any settings at all.

I guess I can see what the default settings are. probably will just need to get used to the idea of going with defaults - something which always failed me in the past. every single one of my old settings was customised and tweaked from job to job via experience to get sharp, high resolution images. This is back to square one unfortunately; but maybe that's for the best.

Update: new rendering at 1/2 resolution is going to take ~1 hour to render - much better than 20 hours. I'd also admit that it probably looks a bit nicer as well with defaults (surprised tbh). My light multipliers were able to be reduced to reasonable levels and brute force (lets call that the idiot mode - works for me) does (and always has) looked quite good. I also ticked some ambient occlusion as well which I feel helps this job a little bit in defining some details - the default setting is very subtle which I like the look of. I tweaked some more materials - my old hedge had some kind of glossy reflections on it with transparency and I just turned all of that off for the sake of speed and it still looks OK regardless. Background, sun, sky and reflections are now all working as intended as well.

This brings me to another point though. Why not implement the preview window with just a very basic vray AO and try to make it realtime interactive? even if its not a 100% match to the rendered product?. IPR has been awesome though - best new feature to VRAY I've seen but I feel these are all work-arounds to the ultimate flaw which is the inability to see the scene with some GI in real time on just an average PC/ laptop like can be done in other software. Maybe it's already there but I feel the camera window should have a basic 'faked' AO+GI on by default with some reference to the IPR 'look'. just my 2c

[paulison]

one last question - if I'm network rendering via backburner, should it be borrowing the vray licence for this? I would like to do some test renders while these images generate on my other machine. the last time I used this we had a renderfarm and didn't have licence borrowing issues like this.

Shouldn't it operate like 3DSmax in general where your rendering machine doesn't actually need a separate licence? if it's unavoidable, no problem but it would be nice to render finished work while testing other scenes. at the moment I just end up letting them sit in the queue till the evening.

EDIT: sorry - figured it out. I'd have to buy a separate render node...I swear it never used to be like that and we could add as many machines to the render farm as we wanted without additional cost. oh well....business is business I guess!

[glorybound]

Welcome back!

Licensing has also changed. You'll need a license for each node. Like the guys said, all defaults work almost all the time. Make sure you use the denoiser element, which will help clean up the noise.

[paulison]

yeah since yesterday I've been pumping out heaps of renderings at a decent speed and getting hammered by my boss to try various things. I guess he's excited.

the noise isn't too much of an issue to be honest - even at a relatively low resolution. I have looked into the dioniser though and this will be essential for most jobs. at this stage I'm not using it while I work on other things such as lighting. Again though the IPR is making things much more enjoyable to work with than the old *click and hope* vray from years ago.

It's interesting to see how things change. Once upon a time the bruteforce method was so slow it was unusable, now the best method seems to be BF+LC - very nice results without shadow blotching but I can see there will be bigger jobs which will need the dionoiser further away from the camera etc.

I like how my scene easily transitions from a daytime scene to an evening scene without changing anything other than the sun angle. My last experience of this was needing to change so many things that it needed a different scene for each time of the day.

I also remember trying to use the ambient occlusion back in the day - it was horrible, but now i'm just going to render everything with it on because I like the nice subtle effect in vray now. certainly a lot of good advancements/improvements.

The next thing I may be considering is looking at the various RTX GPU rendering options - possibly in an external box to accompany my laptop or in my rendering machine - I notice you have the TITAN....worth the money?

[Ihno]

I think two 2080 ti's with nvlink bridge will give you more power for the buck.
If your main board and your power supply can manage them.
Two titans RTX's would be even better though

[glorybound]

I have one Titan RTX and my CPU renders faster. I am working on getting a second one, so I'll see what happens then.

[Neilg]

GPU rendering is still early days - personally i'd stick with AMD and a 3900x and wait a year or so to see whats next. you can build an entire 3900x rendernode for under $1400. or add an rtx2060 for $350 more - good enough for gpu rendering for materials and object development, just not final scene rendering.
Or spend $3k on a 3970x build which would be twice as fast.

Titan rtx builds gets into the $5-10k range.

[werticus]

AMD's threadripper CPUs made GPU rendering less interesting.