Dedicated Overrides Section

[alexyork]

Well, with v3 just about to be released I'm sure this is going to be a long way off if it happens, but worth putting out there now, I guess!

What I'd love to see is a dedicated section in the vray render settings for Overrides and Global Controls. That would include, hopefully, among others, the ability to turn on/off and adjust the following:

- refraction on/off
- reflection on/off
- refraction traces (depth) control
- relection traces (depth) control
- glossy reflection override
- glossy refraction override
- glossy reflection interpolation override
- glossy refraction interpolation override
- lighting override
- shadows override
- material override
- bump mapping on/off
- displacement on/off

And others. The idea being that you could very quickly turn on or off these features for testing. Currently all these various overrides are scattered throughout the UI in different places and a few important are (I think) missing.

I have one other wish - the ability not to display the Interpolation pass (or other non IR/LC/render passes) in the VFB because it looks so drastically different to the main IR pass, making testing a little tricky.

[trixian]

+1 and a large thumbs up from me.

[vlado]

This was, in fact, included in the original 3.0 interface draft. There are a few issues that remained to be cleared though:

= First, it is not easy for us to move parameters between rollouts without breaking scene compatibility with 2.x (this can be solved, of course, but potentially a little buggy in a first implementation);
= Second, and more important, what happens to the existing controls? Do we remove them from their original location, or do we duplicate them?

Best regards,
Vlado

[alexyork]

Great to hear this was/is in development! Yes I see your issues. I'm not sure how to tackle number 2. You don't want redundancy. I guess you could leave the original controls where they are but have them redirect to the Overrides Section when clicked?

[super gnu]

could you not have the "overrides section" as an extension of the global switches? they are afterall, global switches. just a box at the bottom of the global switches rollout.. that way you can just move the existing ones into the new box.. not a big change.

[trixian]

Would repositioning the parameters and check boxes brake scene compatability? Do the parameters care where they are placed?
Would you not be able to stack them all in their own section in the ui like Alex says, by moving the existing ones and adding the new ones?

In any case, I actually think breaking things from time to time might be necessary (though slightly painful), if it is for the better. Consolidating and cleaning up the UI usually is.
You also should "never" fall into the habit of keeping duplicate parameters. This is by far one of the most useless things you can do for a UI. It only pleases a few old guys not willing to change their ways, but absolutely horrifies people trying to learn your program. Just take max as a great example. This also reflects back on complexity of documentation/help files (something you Chaos guys are rather sloppy at recently).

[vlado]

Hmm, now that I think about it, all those options are already in the global switches rollout (minus the ones that we don't have at all). So we would just be reshuffling controls in the same rollout, it seems?

Best regards,
Vlado

[alexyork]

Global Switches is fine. But I think we need more options in there. Particularly breaking up the refl/refr depth etc.

[vlado]

reflects back on complexity of documentation/help files (something you Chaos guys are rather sloppy at recently).

I would actually remove "recently" from that statement But, we are trying to improve things for the 3.0 release.

Best regards,
Vlado

[3LP]

Yeah sound great.

One that I really wish is a material override that keep reflection and refraction.
We are too often doing chalk render (white) to set up our lighting but I need to select all the reflective and refractive materials and ditch the diffuse to put white and exclude them from the override...
So I would add those override as a child of the master override material section, and bump/displace could be part of that override as well, it's nide to keep all the details and just rendering white...

Stan

[vlado]

One that I really wish is a material override that keep reflection and refraction.
We are too often doing chalk render (white) to set up our lighting but I need to select all the reflective and refractive materials and ditch the diffuse to put white and exclude them from the override... So I would add those override as a child of the master override material section, and bump/displace could be part of that override as well, it's nide to keep all the details and just rendering white...

I think, we need something slightly different from a material override here. From what I understand, you simply want a way to tell all VRayMtl materials in the scene to use a specified (usually light grey) diffuse color, while keeping all their other parameters intact, is that correct? This will keep all reflections and refractions, 2-sided materials, bumps and displacement.

Best regards,
Vlado

[3LP]

Correct,
If you could do something like that, it would be great

Thanks

Stan

[super gnu]

sounds like something VMC could do easily.. of course undoing later is an issue... but just save another copy of the file..

[trixian]

Scene states should handle this (shudder)........or alernatively, knowing Autodesk, completely corrupt the file.

[super gnu]

definitely save another copy of the file :P