General Wishlist after a few Months...

[dbuchhofer]

(EDITING, NEWER WISHES AT THIRD POST) Edits to this one in bold..

Ok, I've been using Vray for about 8 months now, nearly exclusively in fairly heavy production (With a fair amount of Radiosity, and Finalrender mixed in.) Still using version U so mabye some of the things are covered already..

**Things I think are *needed*

-First, I'd like to be able to save the irradiance map after each frame of a calculation.. I've had several instances of the machine crashing midway through collecting lighting and having to be restarted from scratch.. A bit on the expensive side on long single scenes.. saving to multiple maps or to single maps would be nice.. I see you've added maxscript handles to this so its probably already possible via scripting. See second post

-To go along with that, we *need* to be able to append to a saved irradiance map via network rendering.. Having to use an interactive copy to add lighting to a irradiance map is silly.. Network rendering is God here See second post

-A nice addition that would go with those two would be being able to render a certain number of frames from an animation, say the first 20, Save the solution to a file, and load that file into the network rendering servers, use that as a "starting point" and render on from there appending to the file from multiple servers at once.. Could possibly work if the access rights are good.. Downside, The solution might deviate on different machines over time on long animations.. --Edit.. After thinking a little more on this, Some redundancy while doing the networked calculations would be appreciated also.. Say if we render every 6th frame, take the samples from the previous 1 and the next one and average between them for the current on each sample? I realise this will only really work well on machines of the same speed.. but its an idea? The compiling of the maps could be done by the Manager mabye.. Since you can't render on the manager currently anyway! (See below)

-Set the CPU usage for a networked job.. Currently settable in the Backburner supposedly.. Though if i recall, its broken.. But really, Would prefer to see it in the Local version also.. Attach the current version of VrayRender to a certain CPU to a certain %'age.. I multitask.. Always..
Low priority checkbox, already there

-Alpha channel for VrayMtl.. Absolute must.. Currently have to run the Vraymtl through the VrayMtlWrapper with alpha set to -1 in the wrapper for glass..
You did it, We love it!

-A set of Diffuse/Specular checkbox's for the VrayLight, so i dont have to use Omni's set to specular only if i can't afford to use blurry reflections. (Almost never can afford it time-wise)
Could be interesting still.. Wondering about the possibility of Square speculars

-The render to Layers, OR, Fix the matte object/material to not fully raytrace when its going through refractive objects.. also make matte objects not reflect the envieronment
Supposedly in the works.. popped up once a LONG time ago as part of the VrayVFB, hasn't been seen since

-Self illumination and Diffuse level on Vraymtl..
Eh, not so needed.. But would help in allowing the switch to Photon Mapping


**Would be nice kinda stuff:

-Expanding the little viewer utility to allow editing/joining of solutions (You mentioned that in a post somewhere.. could be useful, mabye more pain then worth though imho)
You did it, We Love it!

-Allow to exclude from skylight.. (I know this is impossible, but hey! thats why its a wishlist)
Can kinda be worked around with Skylight Portals.. but would still be nice

-A few more Shading modes in the VrayMtl.. Specifically an anistrophic/metal and a 2 layer fake specular would be most helpful.. Again, since its rarely in the time budget so far to use blurred reflections..
the Blend and highlight only plugins can work here, but its a pain if you need to do any real editing.. Would still be nice!


-Make a catch/dialog that will prompt for Gbuffer layers if needed, Have it select whichever the render is asking for, with a 20-second timeout to turn them on by default and render.. removes a couple steps for newer folks, an error, and a crash bug when using rpf/Render effects..
It still crashes..

-Is it possible to add a store in irradiance map checkbox for Vrayshadows? I tend to think not, but worth asking.. This may replace my needs for the specular component in vraylights
More thought puts this at more pain then return..

-Vraylights to show as a different color when they are shut off.. Or else a way to incorporate them into the Light Lister that comes with max5..
yay fixed

-Speedwise my main complaint comes in terms of Glossy Refraction/Reflection.. To be useful with interpolation the lighting solution needs to be prohibitively high.
Splitting it away from the irmap is great.

-Being able to 'Exclude' Some objects from Motion Blur would allow it to be used a lot more in our day to day animation.. Currently end up using Rpf for most.. and only compositing the real deal on problem areas.. Useful as is, But hey, Wishlist!
Mabye allow 1 ObjSample motion blur to set things to be ignored?

-Is it possible to add interpolation to Vraymat's? I ask because I like to use custom falloff's for some glassy effects, and adding some glossy to that would be quite nice.. Sometimes fresnel just doesn't cut it.
Redundant, you can add falloffs to vraymtls..

-Better support (read:Speed) for the Falloff material, or a custom VrayFalloff.. (Mabye one for my Learning to Prgram with the SDK Quest..) Really just need the spline curve editor!
see above..

-I've got a gimped together maxscript VrayMtl global editor and a Standard->Vraymtl converter.. a real UI and thought out version would be nice.. Possibly options to Convert for Speed, or Quality.. Only really applicable once the Vraymtl will support some form of Specular component..
works, thanks, one to go the other direction might be fun also, but thats more on us i think

And if you've made it that far, Thanks..
A few thoughts as the 'fix it' guy on an Architectual Animation team.

Thats a decent amount of things added in the 6 months since i wrote this for free! thanks.

[stefan]

Hi Dave!

Vlado or someone else from the Chaost team will probably comment on this anyway, but since I´m seem to be the first...

The CPU-Utilisation can be controlled in the latest build to some extent by checking the low priority flag in the render menu. I don´t know how this behaves in an network render situation..

Anisotropic reflection is in the latest build as well. Not fully fledged yet, but it`s there and working.

Not sure what you mean with the shadows stored in the irradiance map, but you can store the illumination of VrayLights in the irradiance map if this is of any help.

Regarding speed of glossy reflections: In the latest build you can control the GI and glossy effects on a per shader basis (meaning the iradiance map computaion is decoupled from the glossy computaion). You can have an interpolated glossy effect computed at a detail of -3 to 0 and irradiance map settings of -4 -2 if you like. Makes subsurface scattering effects a lot faster too, since they almost allways need high settings to look good.


As for the rest of the wishes: They cove pretty much everything that`s already on my wishlist too. I can only second them Great wishlist!

Stefan

[dbuchhofer]

Well, its 6 months later, and looking back nearly everything i'd had is in sight, or done and useful. Thanks!

Currently, my wishlist is a little more complicated.. I think most things can be done by scripting.. looking into it, If anyone has some tips on handling things like this I'm happy to throw some time at it.

** Ideas that may or may not work

First, I've seen it mentioned many times, but don't know if anyone has actually DONE it..

-- A callback script to save Vray Imaps every frame of an animation.. I'd like to be able to do this both Incrementally (as in saving every frame seperately, go into it later) and overwriting a single file.

Now, my thoughts in this are.. Assuming that the ImapViewer that vlado cooked up still works (And that the merge works as i think it would..(averaging overlapping), you could send a Network render to multiple machines to save an irradiance map every frame.. This could be done either in the same way you would save a sequence of frames, or saved in terms of 1 vrmap per machine.

The purpose would be twofold, One.. a Safety net to allow some recovery of time from crashed Imap Calc jobs if the job was sent to a single machine.. Two, a way to essentially 'bake' an irmap for a single frame type animation.. Three, With the ImapViewer merge tool, a way to distribute the irmap calculations over multiple machines, and come up with a single combined Irradiance map.

(Come on, admit you could use it! toss out some help)

-- Second wish/Idea.

Be able to load an Irradiance map into a network render, and continue adding to it incrementally.

Same crashing scenario as before is what is driving this.. Currently if your irradiance map needs some additional info, you need to load it into an Interactive copy of Max, render once, switch to incremental, and then commence rendering the new bits as needed..

Method, Callback that would Load the Irmap, Render the first frame of the animation, on the postRenderFrame call, Set the time back to the beginning of the animation, Switch the Advanced irradiance map mode from "From file" to "Incremental" then commence rendering the setup from there, to end..

The rest of my wishlist is pretty much in everyones list

-Layering support
-Gbuffers
-Ability to fake speculars
-A way to control the AA on an area by area or per object basis
-fix for the issues with displacement smoothing when using a Positive displacement, and a Negative shift

Regards,
Dave Buchhofer.

[Dynedain]

This is what I use to put netrender in low priority. Put this line in a script in your maxlocationscriptsstartup folder:

if isnetserver() do sysinfo.maxpriority = #low


This will make sure that any instances of max that are running as a render server will start in low priority.