Fprime style interactive previewer

[mcvltd]

Would be really nice to have an 'Fprime' style interactive previewer for Vray. I used to find it very useful for getting fast lighting setups and it helped with getting matl's looking good too. It really did reduce the amount of setup time by a massive percentage. No more test renders! The quality of render within the previewer wouldn't have to be spot on either, just enough to make judgements on lighting and colours.

Rob.

[vlado]

I know this has been requested before, but the problem is that 3dsmax was not really designed with this in mind - internally 3dsmax can be either in an interactive state, or rendering state, but not both; switching back and forth is anything but fast. As far as I know, rendering in lightwave is separate from modelling, so this issue is not present there, but it is an issue for 3dsmax. There may be some way around this, however. We'll see

Best regards,
Vlado

[mcvltd]

Vlado, you're right, Lightwave is split into two separate programs - one for modelling and one for rendering. Although LW9 is meant to have some basic modelling capabilities within the rendering part of the program, but I haven't even opened my copy of LW9 since I got Vray (probably never will now..).

Would it be possible to have a 'pop-up' window that froze max in the background (so no modelling could be done) and would have four views (top, front, right, camera) and just allowed you to move cameras, lights and adjust materials?

Just an idea, unfortunatley I don't have a clue as to how/if this can be achieved, so appologise if I'm being stupid!

[instinct]

There is a script that opens a floating window and does a small low quality rendering of you scene that updates as you move anything. But with bigger scenes that get´s pretty unusable :/

[studioDIM]

Something that set me thinking was that i managed to set up a small scene to be used as material preview.
It uses vray sun and sky, mapped to a domelight, to render a pure qmc GI solution in the material editor.
The thing that got me thinking was that despite the fairly good settings (16 subdivs and 3 bounces for the GI, 8 subdivs for the sun) it rendered only marginally slower than the standard material samples.
If there was a way to access the popup- material preview, i could indeed script a limited, but working hack of some sort or the other.

Any scripter with experience on max's render() or framebuffers would be appreciated :P

Lele

[instinct]

You might wanna take a look at http://www.mechnology.com/mechlabs/v...viewrender.htm

It basically does that...but has some issues, and as mentioned gets unworkable with bigger scenes...but it basically works.

Thorsten

[studioDIM]

yeah, i gave a look at some script, and unless Vlado makes VRay flagged compatible with the activeshade, we're not gonna get the real thing.
And aye, it does become instable if done like they did: full blown renderer with callbacks.
Makes for a painful time at best: i'd rather have a 1 sec or 2 delay before the renderer started anyways.
It's of course the only possible way afaik (no way to access the mateditor zoomed preview): render() into VFB.

Lele