V-Ray 3.4 Problems/Thoughts/Rants

[LudvikKoutny]

Hi,

so I've finally got to try 3.4 release, and I have quite mixed feelings to say at least. Here's a list of all the issues I've found so far:

VFB:

It seems like VFB has been changed/rewritten a bit, as some parts seem to be reskinned, but it also got significantly slower.

When Light Cache is computing, entire VFB becomes extremely laggy.

When rendering is going on, moving VFB window around causes weird mouse-chopping lag. This is the nasty "my GPU driver is about to fail, i should better restart my computer" kind of lag. Quite annoying.

VFB window resizing is now very laggy as well, feels like 5FPS choppy motion.

When rendering is going on, it seems that V-Ray now freezes a lot of other Windows apps, such as Windows Photo viewer, Wordpad, or Google chrome, despite 3dsmax.exe process being set to low priority. I think this is related to the VFB changes as well.

This is the first VFB performance regression ever since I started to use V-Ray at 2.2 version, and it's quite severe one.

Denoiser:

There are quite a few issues with it. I am really baffled that some of these happened given that all it would take to avoid them would be a little bit of common sense:

1,
Using denoiser populates VFB render element list with about a dozen of garbage render elements. I can hardly imagine anyone could use data out of these to to improve setup of the denoiser, nor should the be expected/required to do so. I like to keep my scenes clean and neat, and having dozen of garbage render elements polluting my render element list is quite annoying. There should be option to hide extra denoiser elements from VFB, and this option should be on by default. This way, if one used denoising set to separate elements, there would be only one additional element, and if one used option to replace RGB, there would be no additional elements at all.

I have currently a scene where I have about 12 render elements set up with very strict and clean naming, mask mattes mostly. Enabling denoiser in that scene makes Render element dropdown a complete mess. What's even worse is that these garbage elements then get saved to hard drive, doubling the amount of EXRs stored. So I have to go through the trouble of manually deleting them. Has anyone even put any though in practical denoiser workflow?

2,
Why does generate render elements default to all possible? Why not depending on type? Why populate RAM memory with useless elements by default?

3,
When using "Replace RGB with denoised result mode", denoising is not applied when rendering is cancelled, nor is it applied when rendering is stopped using V-Ray VFB, so basically, if I stop the render, everything is lost. This also made me initially think that Replace RGB with denoised result mode doesn't work at all. I mean what the.... how... really?

4,
When using Replace RGB with denoised result mode, once rendering is done, I can not use update button in VrayDenoise render element, so I can not adjust those settings interactively after rendering is done, while with Store denoised in separate element mode, I can. Again, why...? O_o

5,
Why is update frequency potato multiplier? I finally hoped you guys came to your senses and realized that every value should be in some human brain readable metric. Currently, there is default of 10 potatoes. After every 10 potatoes, result gets updated.... Actually no, even more counter-intuitively, increasing potato amount results in more frequent updates, and limit is 100 potatoes, so when I set it to 100, denoising updates 100 times every potato. Great!

Seriously, why isn't it seconds, or passes? Why does it again have to be some cryptic, counter-intuitive multiplier.

6,

It seems that even in Store denoised result in separate element mode, if rendering is stopped or cancelled, denoising does not occur, so it seems like any more rendering data generated since last periodical denoiser update gets simply thrown away.

7,
Wouldn't VFB be a lot better place for these controls? You already have so ridiculously high amount of buttons and knobs in VFB that one more could not really hurt. At first, I could not even find the new denoising feature, but even now that I do, it's still quite a PITA to open render settings, go to the elements tab, find VrayDenoiser in the list of elements, click it, scroll it down, and only then start adjusting the stuff. Also, since Max's UI is frozen during rendering, if denoiser ever gets any feature that can be updated during render, without stopping it, we won't be able to use it anyway.

V-Ray Light UI

I am disappointed the way this was handled. I hoped for some usability improvement, but things were just shuffled around, semi-randomly. It still has no order or clean alignment. It needs more though put into it than just random pouring of stuff from one rollout to another. I could make a mockup of how it should look, but not sure it would be of any use, because you probably won't change UI of the light twice in two successive releases :/ Missed opportunity... quite sad

So yeah, these are my impressions of 3.4 release. Quite a letdown after so much initial hype.

[Art48]

I can agree with some of your points regarding the Denoiser although I still have to test it more.
But I think for the first implementation this is a huge feature and the drawback of some default settings or render elements seems very negligible to me. Other stuff like the settings for it are all just first-implementation-issues to me which get resolved after more user feedback as always. Yeah okay it could have been better positioned initially etc but to be honest I rather like the developers focusing on the programming and have UI come later - better than the other way around!
As for the potato number - have you read the tooltip? What the number does is quite clear, yet I can understand that maybe a per pass number or something would be more intuitive but it's definitely not potatoes
Regarding the many elements and the "All" default: In my opinion it's especially important at the beginning when users want to try stuff out and if they would get a message that it doesnt work because render elements are missing or something similar the forums would be full of people thinking its bugged or doesn't work etc.

Not denoising when cancelling: I think it is fine if it doesn't - it would lead to needless lags when doing previews (and I would want to have my preview denoised in the end, especially useful here!) An option would have been nice though.

Also for me there has been zero degradation in the VFB at all (Max 2014 with Win7 here).

Just my two cents. Personally I feel that it's a stellar servicepack and has no lesser quality than the ones before.

[vlado]

Ludvík, I'm not even going to bother replying this time... I realize now that you will never be happy with anything I do - which is understandable, you work for the Corona team after all - but I prefer to focus on people that do find V-Ray useful.

Best regards,
Vlado

[RotemS]

Why is update frequency potato multiplier? I finally hoped you guys came to your senses and realized that every value should be in some human brain readable metric. Currently, there is default of 10 potatoes. After every 10 potatoes, result gets updated.... Actually no, even more counter-intuitively, increasing potato amount results in more frequent updates, and limit is 100 potatoes, so when I set it to 100, denoising updates 100 times every potato. Great!

lol. Harsh but hilarious criticism

[vlado]

lol. Harsh but hilarious criticism

Which I am totally going to ignore... Sorry.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Art48]

you work for the Corona team

If that's true that's some bad spirit here I have to say.
On the one hand I can understand your frustration yet it is a bit exaggerated. But working for a competitor and writing that stuff in the style/tone you did honestly doesn't shed a good light on the corona developers.
Full disclosure: I have touched corona on the surface and cannot claim the same level of knowledge or the style/apporach of developers.

[Art48]

Which I am totally going to ignore... Sorry.

Best regards,
Vlado

I think you should not discard the points entirely, there is some valid criticism hidden in there although not to the scale the tone implies - only the UI points in my opinion but I've talked about that in my first reply.

[kosso_olli]

Regarding No. 5: Did you read the tooltip? The answer is right there... In my opinion this is a very strong release. No reason to rant.
And as far as I know Ludvik does Training and support for Render Legion/Corona developers.

[Vizioen]

Jesus dude, you sound like my highschool teacher. You're talking like you've been waiting 10 years for this update and all sorts of stuff was promised but not delivered. Although I agree on some points (unnecessary render elements, 'hidden' denoiser function), your condescending way of communicating this will get you nowhere imho.

[LudvikKoutny]

Ludvík, I'm not even going to bother replying this time... I realize now that you will never be happy with anything I do - which is understandable, you work for the Corona team after all - but I prefer to focus on people that do find V-Ray useful.

Best regards,
Vlado

Actually, not anymore, at least not full-time I mean, if you were to hire me for the same thing I do for them, be it UI design, or tutorials, I would not have much problem with it. I use V-Ray actually more than Corona these days, because while Corona is indeed great renderer, it's renderer currently focused on ArchViz, yet I am shifting more and more towards VFX work these days. For VFX, V-Ray is a lot better tool, mainly because all the experience it has gained over it's life. If there is some very specific production challenge, there's 99% chance someone already came across that challenge before, and there's some solution for it in V-Ray.

The fact I work(ed) for Corona doesn't mean I am Corona fanboy. I like each renderer for different reason, and trust me, I don't spare Corona developers from my criticism either. The fact is that where I live, salaries, while reasonable, are not that high, so buying V-Ray was quite an investment, especially since I originally bought it for personal projects, not even anything commercial. Yet the investment paid off. What I am trying to do here is to make most of this investment. If V-Ray get's better, than it's big plus for me and my work. If I was some sort of Corona spy, why would I bother sending you bug reports and spending so much time writing down ideas on how to improve V-Ray.

I kinda figured out my Corona background was the reason I did not get access to nightlies, yet when I was buying V-Ray I naively hoped my Corona background would not get in the way. So yeah, I do understand this criticism may be a bit too harsh, and that I very often don't watch the way I word it (that's why I got banned from nVidia forum after all ), but I do not think it makes it any less valid. I will still be using V-Ray on nearly daily basis in near future, and I will be very happy if the workflow gets ironed out.

As for not liking anything you do, that's not true, actually there's a huge list of things that I like a lot about V-Ray that were added in recent versions:
Triplanar tex
No more need of local subdivs
Better domelight defaults
Clean up of samplers
Aerial perspective
Stochastic Flakes
Volume Grid
GI on by default
Improved reflective caustics
Defaults in general (Light Cache settings for example)
Tooltips
...
Actually... If i had to write a list of all things I like added since 3.3 it would make entire page...

I just get sometimes too fiery when I see great potential spoiled by workflow deficiencies.

And if this was over the line, then I absolutely apologize

[LudvikKoutny]

BTW, I also carefully avoided comparing to, or even mentioning Corona in my entire point, just for this reason

[Syclone1]

Jesus dude, you sound like my highschool teacher. You're talking like you've been waiting 10 years for this update and all sorts of stuff was promised but not delivered. Although I agree on some points (unnecessary render elements, 'hidden' denoiser function), your condescending way of communicating this will get you nowhere imho.

Well said, the original post was done in completely bad taste and I do not blame Vlado at all for the stance he is taking, and do also commend Vlado for the professional reply to a childish attack.

[LudvikKoutny]

I actually have to agree now that I read it again, it's quite inappropriate tone. I get hot-headed quickly and don't read things much before I post them... I am trying to work on that, but obviously not hard enough. So I apologize once again. If all of this gets deleted, I won't mind. If it doesn't let it stay there for my shame

[Syclone1]

Actually, not anymore, at least not full-time I mean, if you were to hire me for the same thing I do for them, be it UI design, or tutorials, I would not have much problem with it.

If this was your end goal then I think you might have missed the mark. Rethink your tone when writing reviews to be less juvenile and more professional otherwise nobody will take you seriously.

[^Lele^]

Hi,
so I've finally got to try 3.4 release,and I have quite mixed feelings to say at least. Here's a list of all the issues I've found so far:
VFB:
It seems like VFB has been changed/rewritten a bit, as some parts seem to be reskinned, but it also got significantly slower.
When Light Cache is computing, entire VFB becomes extremely laggy.
When rendering is going on, moving VFB window around causes weird mouse-chopping lag. This is the nasty "my GPU driver is about to fail, i should better restart my computer" kind of lag. Quite annoying.
VFB window resizing is now very laggy as well, feels like 5FPS choppy motion.
When rendering is going on, it seems that V-Ray now freezes a lot of other Windows apps, such as Windows Photo viewer, Wordpad, or Google chrome, despite 3dsmax.exe process being set to low priority. I think this is related to the VFB changes as well.

This is the first VFB performance regression ever since I started to use V-Ray at 2.2 version, and it's quite severe one.

We'll surely investigate these claims, thanks for reporting them.

Denoiser:
There are quite a few issues with it. I am really baffled that some of these happened given that all it would take to avoid them would be a little bit of common sense:
1,
Using denoiser populates VFB render element list with about a dozen of garbage render elements. I can hardly imagine anyone could use data out of these to to improve setup of the denoiser, nor should the be expected/required to do so. I like to keep my scenes clean and neat, and having dozen of garbage render elements polluting my render element list is quite annoying. There should be option to hide extra denoiser elements from VFB, and this option should be on by default. This way, if one used denoising set to separate elements, there would be only one additional element, and if one used option to replace RGB, there would be no additional elements at all.

I have currently a scene where I have about 12 render elements set up with very strict and clean naming, mask mattes mostly. Enabling denoiser in that scene makes Render element dropdown a complete mess. What's even worse is that these garbage elements then get saved to hard drive, doubling the amount of EXRs stored. So I have to go through the trouble of manually deleting them. Has anyone even put any though in practical denoiser workflow?

Incredibly, we have.
The elements are auto-generated based on the denoiser settings in the RE interface.
They are generated when one plans to experiment with the command-line tool, or needs to denoise a sequence.
The denoised result of the command line tool will produce a simple RGB of the denoised image.
All this will have a few more options (in the cmdLine tool and the denoiser REs) on how to treat the elements, but they are there to stay (particularly if through user choice.)
Your existing elements are left untouched, whatever you do with the denoiser.

2,
Why does generate render elements default to all possible? Why not depending on type? Why populate RAM memory with useless elements by default?

It's there by default because the denoiser needs them, people testing it wanted them (you'll notice they are not garbage, but the basic REs to rebuild a beauty through industry-standard LWF, additive, compositing methods. Plus a few the Denoiser specifically needs.), and because you have the option set to generate them, which by now you know you can change.

3,
When using "Replace RGB with denoised result mode", denoising is not applied when rendering is cancelled, nor is it applied when rendering is stopped using V-Ray VFB, so basically, if I stop the render, everything is lost. This also made me initially think that Replace RGB with denoised result mode doesn't work at all. I mean what the.... how... really?

yes.
Every other mode is non-destructive, so cancelling the render has the denoiser carry on its work, to put the results in the proper element.
For the replace mode, one assumes the cancelling should also cancel the replacement of your precious, and forever gone afterwards, beauty render.
Sound logic, as far as i am concerned.
Feel free to suggest a better one, however.

4,
When using Replace RGB with denoised result mode, once rendering is done, I can not use update button in VrayDenoise render element, so I can not adjust those settings interactively after rendering is done, while with Store denoised in separate element mode, I can. Again, why...? O_o

Read above. It's inherent you won't be able to redenoise the denoised RGB.
Use one of the many other modes.

5,
Why is update frequency potato multiplier? I finally hoped you guys came to your senses and realized that every value should be in some human brain readable metric. Currently, there is default of 10 potatoes. After every 10 potatoes, result gets updated.... Actually no, even more counter-intuitively, increasing potato amount results in more frequent updates, and limit is 100 potatoes, so when I set it to 100, denoising updates 100 times every potato. Great!
Seriously, why isn't it seconds, or passes? Why does it again have to be some cryptic, counter-intuitive multiplier.

Percent of time denoising versus percent of time rendering, as the tooltip explains.
But you can call it Potatoes.

6,
It seems that even in Store denoised result in separate element mode, if rendering is stopped or cancelled, denoising does not occur, so it seems like any more rendering data generated since last periodical denoiser update gets simply thrown away.

Cancelling doesn't initiate a denoise, regardless of mode.
Using the max2017 stop button will, however.
In any event, what's stopping you from canceling a render, go to the denoise Re and press "update"?

7,
Wouldn't VFB be a lot better place for these controls? You already have so ridiculously high amount of buttons and knobs in VFB that one more could not really hurt. At first, I could not even find the new denoising feature, but even now that I do, it's still quite a PITA to open render settings, go to the elements tab, find VrayDenoiser in the list of elements, click it, scroll it down, and only then start adjusting the stuff. Also, since Max's UI is frozen during rendering, if denoiser ever gets any feature that can be updated during render, without stopping it, we won't be able to use it anyway.

You seem to be drawing a lot of assumptions from someone else's workflow.
Try this workflow: set a high noise threshold, add the denoiser, let the image finish rendering with the bucketed render.
Go to the denoiser RE tab, play, press update.
Notice this isn't something belonging to the VFB, like for others, as this is not a "blend" spinner between a denoised and non-denoised image: this restarts the denoising process with an entirely different set of parameters.
So you can save each denoised result one after the other, and you only had one RGB render to accomplish.
"Set, denoise, save, set, denoise, save, set, denoise, save" was the idea.

The VFB would *not* be a better place for the controls regardless: the denoiser denoises during rendering as well, so it has to be set up BEFORE the render starts, and it'd be silly to ask the user to open the VFB to adjust it.
The ancillary benefits of it being a RE with its own controls are scriptability and accessibility (some don't even use a VFB to render, go figure!).

V-Ray Light UI
I am disappointed the way this was handled. I hoped for some usability improvement, but things were just shuffled around, semi-randomly. It still has no order or clean alignment. It needs more though put into it than just random pouring of stuff from one rollout to another. I could make a mockup of how it should look, but not sure it would be of any use, because you probably won't change UI of the light twice in two successive releases :/ Missed opportunity... quite sad

I'm sorry you feel that way, Vlado gave it quite a lot of thought, and went through a few revisions and feedback, to get it just right.
I personally love it, and wouldn't change one bit of it, but rather continue on the path already undertaken, and just keep working at making it better.
We have broad ideas and goals, along with immediate ones, and are pursuing those as time allows.

So yeah, these are my impressions of 3.4 release. Quite a letdown after so much initial hype.

The thing is, we had a forum thread asking for denoiser testers, and there was also debate on the light's UIs redesign.
We'll continue with those, feel free to chime in!