VRay Lens Effects - overexposed problem solved

[Alphalpha]

Been playing around with VRay Lens Effects and encountered the overexposed problem others here have experienced (see overexposed.jpg), and general unusability of the VRay Lens Effects dialogue box. After a couple of days of troubleshooting and testing, i'm 99% sure i've discovered the cause of it. Posting this in a new thread because searching the forums seems to turn up a few different threads with this or similar problem.

It's a bug that happens when you use the 'interactive' mode in the effects dialogue BEFORE you do a full render. I've tested this on a number of files (simple and complex) and can reproduce it all the time now.

To test, open your file and enable 'interactive' mode in vray lens effects. It will start rendering in the VFB correctly but when it finishes, the 3ds max frame buffer pops up, and is overexposed. Go back to the VFB and zoom in and out - image changes to overexposed as well! and you can't go back (interacting with any of the buttons in the VFB will 'refresh' the image to the overexposed image as well).

What it looks to be doing is rendering the bloom and glare effects on top of the 'LensEffectSource' element (see LensEffectsSource.jpg).

To fix, simply do a normal render, not through the effects dialogue box. It doesn't even have to be a full render, even a little region render seems to work (see RGB_color.jpg).

Hope that helps some of you out there... See .zip file for test file (Max 2011, VRay 2.30.01).

If vlado and the chaosgroup support team could look into this as well, that would be great.

[tashko.zashev]

Hi,

The issue is reproduced and will send it to the developers for consideration.
This is the max native interactive engine and im not sure whether can be fixed on our side.

V-Ray lens effects (VFB) window has own Interactive control, which can be useful too.

[Alphalpha]

Thank you for that. Is the VFB interactive control only available in the nightly builds. Can't seem to find anything in 2.30.01

[tashko.zashev]

Yes, sorry i forgot to mantion that...
Just for information, the lens effects overexposed issue is added to our bug tracking system.

[super gnu]

finally!!!! thank you very much alphaalpha, this has been bugging me since lenseffects was introduced.

[Alphalpha]

no worries super gnu. When i was searching the forums for this problem I did come across some of your posts (some which dated back to 2011 i think)... glad we finally got to the bottom of it.

I guess i was lucky because i managed to get a rendering which looked correct, but even after that i still kept getting the overexposed one and realised something was amiss here. Once it's working properly, it's a very nice tool that adds a nice finishing touch to the render.

The problem with this bug is that most people wanting to try vray lens effects will more than likely go with the 'interactive' mode for the real-time feedback and to reduce render times, rather than do the full render. Unfortunately that's when the bug kicks in and the result isn't what they are after.