Better viewport support for Vray materials

[gardocki]

The Max viewport has had tons of improvements over the last few years, but most of the features are only compatible with the Physical material and standard lights. Is it possible to add features like proper normal map, HDRI, environmental reflections etc. to the viewport preview of Vray materials and lights?

[vlado]

Probably it's possible; we'll look into it.

Best regards,
Vlado

[CityWrecker]

Yes, and with the new 2020.2 improvements it would be great to have all the PBR viewport features working with Vray materials, lights, dome etc.

[TubeSmokeGuy]

+1 here. The viewport representation of VRayMaterials in 3dsmax is still terrible and nearly ambarrassing when it comes to show viewport grabs to customers. So its about time for changig that. That would be an enormous improvement. But I think that will be a huge task .

[davius3d]

I vouch for that!

So far, the only material that gives proper viewport representation is the Physical Material. I DON'T know how this material performs with Vray Next, but with 3.7 you get almost TWICE the render time using Physical Material instead of VRayMtl. I heard that on Vray Next the compatibility is much improved and I should not notice any performance loss.

Here's some goodies that are possible today on Max's viewport

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=495672734369375

[CityWrecker]

Ahhh, it would be so nice to have the viewport PBR features working properly with Vray materials and lights....I think this would be a big feature to have, and it would be a valuable improvement in Max integration going forward.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16leJu87hJ4

[gardocki]

Alternatively, more optimization for the Physical Material shader would be awesome since it supports all the new features, it's just a lot slower than the Vray material.

[a_nak]

+1 this would be a very valuable update!

[andylewisart]

Agreed! This would be an incredibly useful feature.

[markus_s_cg]

+1. And also add better support for Vray lights in the viewport. A Vray dome light with an HDRI should work the same as having an HDRI in the scene environment slot.

Autodesk probably wants to catch up to EEVEE in Blender and even viewport 2.0 in Maya, but a lot of Max users still use Vray, so unless this is improved, we are missing out on important new features. It would be very nice to have prettier viewports.

[marksmanguy]

+1 to this

[CityWrecker]

Ahhh it's even better now.....3ds max viewport is becoming a major feature and they are developing it very nicely. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDtz_lpWi4g

[TubeSmokeGuy]

I want to push this thread and like to ask if there are any news to this topic from development?

It gets more and more important to have a very good viewport representation of materials and maps.
I think its a no go, that we still have no map support for viewport representation for some VRay Material types (f.e. VRayLightMtl, VRayBlendMtl, VRayScatterVolumeMtl ... etc.).
The 3Dsmax viewport can look so impressive with Arnold that I think it's time VRay had to catch up.

But that are 2 separate pairs of shoes.
The first, very very important one is the ability to show maps through all VRay Material types.
The second, not so extremely important one is the display quality of the VRay shaders in the viewport.

Thank you and greetings!

[vlado]

Yes, there is some progress for the upcoming V-Ray 5, Update 1 - see here:

https://youtu.be/4JTk48wHjlY

Best regards,
Vlado

[TubeSmokeGuy]

This looks very very good! Thank you.
I didn't expect such a quick answer. Awsome!

Does this also include showing texture maps through VRay Material types like VRayLightMtl, VRayBlendMtl, VRayScatterVolumeMtl ... etc, what was formerly not possible?
Or "just" this (impressive) cosmetic update for viewport representation?

Thank you and greetings!