Should we worry about Chos group Licence model being shift to rental?

[dgruwier]

thats just it, you are looking at it from a technical point of view. Yes all those thing you mention are important and Technically Vray is fantastic, I am agreeing with you, BUT the UX needs some attention.

What kinds of things are not user friendly in VRay in terms of UX compared to Corona? I know it's difficult to quantify, but can you give some examples?

[AC5L4T3R]

What kinds of things are not user friendly in VRay in terms of UX compared to Corona? I know it's difficult to quantify, but can you give some examples?

Although it's much improved in recent versions, I still find myself messing about with settings (min. Shading Rate, Noise Threshold etc) in Vray. Where as in Corona, 9/10 times I just press render and wait till it looks good enough.

[AC5L4T3R]

But wait, wasn't the lack of ownership a problem in itself?
Or was it only an issue because of the amounts to be spent?

Not sure what you mean here.

Anyway, I installed the Vray Next trial last night to do some tests as I'd only used it on a 1080 and not a 1080ti and thought that it's not a good idea to make a comparison before having tested both.

[^Lele^]

thats just it, you are looking at it from a technical point of view. Yes all those thing you mention are important and Technically Vray is fantastic, I am agreeing with you, BUT the UX needs some attention.

A while ago I listened to a fantastic podcast (unfortunately it was a Modo modcast with Brad Peebler that is no longer available) about UX and software design. The basic take away I got from it was "you know you have a good UI when it is invisible to the UX". Vray has a long way to go before the UI is invisible.

Now you are biased.
Modo's UI is *all but* invisible, Peebler was being a wee bit hyperbolic, as for his usual self.
Corona has plenty of settings, and the forum's chock full of people with this or that issue which is UI/UX related.
Choosing to ignore it and forcing a point is unfair debating, as it leverages perception, but not objective data.

Show me precise examples (in another thread perhaps) and we may talk in ways leading to actionable items.
Counting UI items needed to get to a final render is easy enough.

Mind you, i'm not stating UX and ultimate performance are mutually exclusive, but some choices will favour one at the expense of the other, often enough (f.e. choice of sampler, complexity/depth of an acceleration structure, and so on.).

I said the opposite of "we only care abut the technical bit", but somehow i removed one part of the reasoning, and it got lost into the language, and the finer point i was making.
We care, have cared, about UX for the past few years, and an active mandate, not a side-kick.
That the effort can't be immediately as far reaching as some users want is a given, as coding properly takes time (cfr. the new VFB), but i find it a bit odd that we should -still!- be thrown under the bus in this comprehensive way.

Although it's much improved in recent versions, I still find myself messing about with settings (min. Shading Rate, Noise Threshold etc) in Vray. Where as in Corona, 9/10 times I just press render and wait till it looks good enough.

But, MSR shouldn't be touched.
Noise threshold either, unless your noise level is bad.
Default V-Ray settings will take an (and nearly *any* with 100 max subdivs.) interior render to visible cleanliness, so if you decide to use it differently from what we've been suggesting for the past *five years* perhaps you should re-evaluate where the issue is, for it ain't with us.
That you're just "happy" to let Corona take its time tells me more about your personal inclination than it does about UX or technical differences between products.

As to my question about ownership: the thread's title suggests people are worried about greedy Chaos not giving them ownership options (ie. permanent licenses).
So i was asking if renting from someone else is fine, provided it ain't Chaos?

[dgruwier]

Although it's much improved in recent versions, I still find myself messing about with settings (min. Shading Rate, Noise Threshold etc) in Vray. Where as in Corona, 9/10 times I just press render and wait till it looks good enough.

You shouldn't have to mess with min shading rate anymore, not for a long time (I think Vlado is planning on hiding it from the interface at this point). The noise threshold is a super basic performance setting that Corona has too, and the default setting in VRay is very sensible (you can always change it if you disagree). Even then, the IPR works like you're describing out of the box. I feel like you might be judging VRay based on how it used to be, not how it is now? Is there anything more substantial or general about the UX that isn't working for you?

edit: Lele beat me to it

[AC5L4T3R]

As to my question about ownership: the thread's title suggests people are worried about greedy Chaos not giving them ownership options (ie. permanent licenses).
So i was asking if renting from someone else is fine, provided it ain't Chaos?

I never said I had a problem with CG switching to a subscription model, so not sure where you got that from.

Default V-Ray settings will take an (and nearly *any* with 100 max subdivs.) interior render to visible cleanliness, so if you decide to use it differently from what we've been suggesting for the past *five years* perhaps you should re-evaluate where the issue is, for it ain't with us.
That you're just "happy" to let Corona take its time tells me more about your personal inclination than it does about UX or technical differences between products.

Where have you been suggesting this? And what "exactly" do you think my personal inclination is? Want to be any more condescending whilst you're at it? Maybe there's a check box I can tick somewhere.

[hoppergrass]

Funny, the podcast may have been hosted by Brad, but it wasn't about Modo it was about UX in general and it is exactly Modo's UX why i don't use Modo.

my point also has been lost in the language, what I meant, as pointed out Corona and Vray use very similar if not the same tech and achieve similar, if not the same results and time frames so maybe make the point of difference be UX, of which vray could do with more refining.

[maxwood]

Just going to copy and paste my comment from another thread at the start of the year about perpetual vs. rental.


To offer a countering opinion, I think it depends on how well it's handled.

For full price licensing look at Houdini - they offer different tiers for different customers and very reasonable pricing for freelancers (earning less than $100k). Most importantly you still get all the same features.

For subscriptions look at Corona - it's cheap enough that it doesn't even matter it's a subscription service and you still have the option to buy outright.

For somewhere in between look at Allegorithmic - you can pay a monthly subscription that pays off the cost of owning the software, pay X months and then you own the software.


I don't think the solution is one or the other but having multiple options available and understanding that no two customers are the same is definitely better.

[^Lele^]

I never said I had a problem with CG switching to a subscription model, so not sure where you got that from.

It being the thread title, i assumed whose which wrote had a gripe with the licensing model.
My bad.

Where have you been suggesting this? And what "exactly" do you think my personal inclination is? Want to be any more condescending whilst you're at it? Maybe there's a check box I can tick somewhere.

We suggested this *every single time* issues cropped up (which weren't bugs).
On the forums, in private email exchanges, through youtube (Vlado himself.). Short of newscasts, i think it's been a singular note we struck from the release of 3.3 onwards. Have a search for my posts on this forum which have "MSR" in them, and come after 3.3, you'll know.
I'm being matter-of-factly here, and as analytical as i can be, not condescending at all.

We hide controls you'd rather unhide and spend time tweaking, but the issue goes away when you use Corona, which you are happy to let run to the end (assumed in inference: without touching a thing otherwise, unlike with us.).
That is clearly not a technical issue from our part, but an attitude issue from yours (not bad attitude. inclination, however you'd like to call it.).
On the lookout for actionable items, here, i'd come away with one solution: remove said controls entirely from the UI, so to not have personal preference and (old!) biases taint the rendering experience.
Which, of course, is impossible in practice.

[hoppergrass]

off the top of my head an example of workflows that could be improved would be vrays version of Coronas "Light Mixer". You are required to render out a whole bunch of render passes, composite them in your favorite compositor, play with it there, then go back to Vray to try emulate what you have in the compositor. A bit convoluted and pretty much a uni-directional workflow.

whereas in Corona, once you set up the light mixer, you play away, if you like it, bake the changes back to the scene (making it Bi-Directional) or save the new image, saving scene states for later re-rendering if needed.

Now I am using light mixer as an example of how you have this great technology but its not as intuitive and user friendly as it could be. I am also not say that Corona's light mixer is perfect either, it could do with further development too.

[^Lele^]

It's a good example, and one which has been actively worked on for the past two years.
It won't, as we stated a few times, arrive before the new VFB will.
We're uneasy releasing tech which can easily break (resolution times number of LightSelects.) for the inattentive (or simply very loaded) user, and that is why to this day we warmly suggest doing it in post.
To ameliorate the issues, the amount of ancillary tech needed is a *lot* more than slapping images in a framebuffer, hence the wait.

Besides this, then, what else do you find lacking?
I'd ask you to reply in a new thread, however, as this has veered off course enough from the original title (for which the answer is "no, we won't globally move to sub-only licensing.").

[M.Max]

"no, we won't globally move to sub-only licensing.").

Thank you !
Someone said it before but just to make it clear I don't mind subscription as OPTION which can be very handy sometimes. for example to rent couple of licenses for a big project .
the thing is right now I'm mostly don't use Vray unless my clients forced me to do it ,so paying for something that I don't use regularly is a bit hard fro me .
I'm still on 3.6 but I'm really looking forward to see the enhanced IPR ( that we have seen in Maya) and updated the VFB I will upgrade right away .

OT (Sorry I couldn't resist ) :
Yes me and almost 70% of people that I know/teach/work with did the jump to Corona for simply 2 reasons IPR and VFB features ..As Bobby said just visit sites like Behance and you will see how much people( in Archviz specifically) did the move . not only the new comers are using it, but also people with more than 10 years experience did the move too (Peter Guthrie , Pikcells ....and many others ) so it is not just a trend or to look cool by using the new tech .
I did write long thread months back in the general section about that, but unfortunately there was no answers form official support .

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Yes me and almost 70% of people that I know/teach/work with did the jump to Corona

I can confirm this here as well..
In Italy many people in the arch vis industry has made the transition.. Corona literally did take over this industry here

for simply 2 reasons IPR and VFB features

Usually number one reason I always hear from people who moved to Corona is that it allows them to achieve this kind of results easier than Vray
Things like this for example,
https://www.behance.net/gallery/68083223/Moscow-dark-ap
https://www.behance.net/gallery/72598387/FOREST-VILLA

Many of these people use Vray as well and can achieve nice results with it, but asking them why they prefer Corona, they say that it is easier to achieve this kind of works. But in Vray, they will rely on a lot of post production to achieve similar results..
All renders in the link below are without any post work in photoshop,
http://www.brugerstudio.com/portfoli...ialline/?id=59

Maybe the XYZ Gamut that Corona uses or probably Corona has better bump mapping/displacement or their light mixer.. I haven't used Corona much to tell the difference
What I can say is that the new updated bloom and glare in Next for Maya is very nice and the updated IPR/undersampling is way faster/better than 3.6
features like debug shading and how IPR/denoising works directly in viewport are handy features, no other engine has..
The IPR in Maya and Modo are way better than Max's in many things.. No idea why Max has a completely different IPR(CPU) compared to Maya or Modo unlike the GPU IPR which is very similar..

Talking to more Corona users, probably the new VFB and an IPR similar to what Vray for Maya has will bring back many people.
For XYZ Gamut, I'm not sure if it makes any difference, but Vlado probably has convincing reasons for not adapting this into Vray
About Bump/displacement quality, I will need to test this in Corona to see if it is any better than Vray.

[Ihno]

I don't use corona but could it be that the switchers are mostly guys who render stills only?
I render 100% animations and I don't really care about vfb cc. That bit Vray offers is enough to roughly simulate what I'll do later in post.
And I wouldn't even consider doing the post before I render an animation and would then have to stick to what I get at frame 500 with the post work I did for frame 0.
That only seems to make sense for stills. Or am I wrong here?
The light mixer sounds handy though.

[^Lele^]

I can confirm this here as well..
In Italy many people in the arch vis industry has made the transition.. Corona literally did take over this industry here

Our numbers paint a very different picture.
It'd seem our customers are less vocal about what they use, or less prone to image sharing.
Regardless, confirmation bias is around any corner, so hey, peace and love and happy renderings, whichever you prefer to use.
And let's close the OT here.