Streamline backplate integration workflow

[Dave_Wortley]

I've mentioned this one several times before, for me it's too complicated to get set up for car renders, it should be a case of specifying HDRI and backplate, press a button to set everything up and it renders correctly. This is what things like VRed, Hypershot, Bunkspeed and that sort of "ohh look how we can render a shiny reflective object in three clicks" works. Unfortunately in some industries people with no knowledge of how CGI works get wowed by this simplicity and invest in it. VRed is being pushed as the automotive standard for rendering, and it does nothing special what-so-ever, except, simplify things by making HDRI dome setups easy and having a predefined 'calibrated' material library. VRay is so good for VFX and Product Vis, but there's a cross-over between product-vis and VFX which only renderers like VRay can deal with, VRed and that sort of thing just can't.

Don't forget about Product Viz Vlado, a simplified workflow for Dome and Backplate would help a lot of people. A really good shader library of realistic rubbers, plastics, glass, chromes, leather, fabric, colour glass would be a great way to boost the quality of things rendered in VRay as there are a lot of people out there who want a 3 click, drag-drop material setup that gives them a great resulf and VRay can do it.

[LudvikKoutny]

I've mentioned this one several times before, for me it's too complicated to get set up for car renders, it should be a case of specifying HDRI and backplate, press a button to set everything up and it renders correctly. This is what things like VRed, Hypershot, Bunkspeed and that sort of "ohh look how we can render a shiny reflective object in three clicks" works. Unfortunately in some industries people with no knowledge of how CGI works get wowed by this simplicity and invest in it. VRed is being pushed as the automotive standard for rendering, and it does nothing special what-so-ever, except, simplify things by making HDRI dome setups easy and having a predefined 'calibrated' material library. VRay is so good for VFX and Product Vis, but there's a cross-over between product-vis and VFX which only renderers like VRay can deal with, VRed and that sort of thing just can't.

Don't forget about Product Viz Vlado, a simplified workflow for Dome and Backplate would help a lot of people. A really good shader library of realistic rubbers, plastics, glass, chromes, leather, fabric, colour glass would be a great way to boost the quality of things rendered in VRay as there are a lot of people out there who want a 3 click, drag-drop material setup that gives them a great resulf and VRay can do it.

I think just resolving those two problems I pointed out would push V-Ray pretty close to the simple solution you are looking for, because then all you would have to do is to put a backplate in 3ds Max's environment slot, put in a DomeLight with corresponding HDRI (and orient it correctly), and just make domelight invisible to see backplate. After that, you just make your ground plane a matte object, and you are good to go. No camera projection map, no hassle with GI, just drop in backplate, dome with HDRI and make your ground geo matte object. 3 relatively simple steps. Of course if could be simplified even further, but even this would be good enough.

[kosso_olli]

@Dave_Wortley: You are absolutely right, I couldn't have said it better. That is just what we need here, especially when there is a photographer sitting next to you telling you how easy that would be in Vred. God, how I hate that pile of s**t. But everyone seems to like it, even if the output is crap.

[Dave_Wortley]

VRed seems to have some pretty clever ray tracing for chrome materials, those clear up loads faster than in VRay RT.

I can see the VRed argument, no-need to convert CAD data, unified materials, you could send Vred files from manufacturer to production house and the colours, the reflections, the bump would be correct, especially if you use X-rite scanned materials. But enforcing a new standard on an entire industry with an unproven product with a very niche market, with about 90% of the users in Germany is not the way to go. Autodesk are pushing VRed as the solution, but for anything complex they say, "oh you'll need to do that in Maya" which means you have to re-make all those materials and you lose any of the selection sets etc... and they don't even acknowledge 3dsmax, which is strange considering you have people like us, burrows, Mackevision all using 3dsmax for automotive work, and plenty more studios too. 3dsmax was pushed as archvis/product vis product for a while, then they buy pi-Vr because they're scared of VRed (or Fred as they have to call it to make is sound audily different from V-Ray). Every demo I've seen of Vred has some serious hardware kicking behind it and I bet if you invested about 1/10th in GPUs, VRayRT would beat it anyway.

There are a few areas where it does a good (read optimised especially for this particular physical object) job. Headlights, Colour glass/plastic for brakes/indicators, and it appears to do all right headlight illumination.

But as far as configuration management, animation, rendering complex amount of passes, it sucks!! They say it can do all of this... ...if you use Python... but their Python API is... to quote Thinkbox... "woefully inadequate".

I have 15 years experience of 3dsmax, 8 years with VRay and I've built one of the most advanced rendering pipelines in the industry, for some accountant to come along and tell me that I need to use VRed for rendering cars because it does 'it quickly' is a complete F**king joke!

[LudvikKoutny]

I agree with most of what you said except this:

VRed seems to have some pretty clever ray tracing for chrome materials, those clear up loads faster than in VRay RT.

The reason you think so is probably because you may creating unnecessarily complex chrome in Vray. VRED library probably contains basic chrome that has no diffuse at all, and no glossiness at all (perfect mirror). Material of such properties will require just a single ray to be completely evaluated. If your chrome contains even a little bit if diffuse, ray branching for direct lights and GI will have to occur. If your chrome contains even little bit of reflection glossiness, even as little as 0.999, it will still trigger branching. But basic simple chrome material is pretty much free for ray tracing, it takes just one ray, and if it's exteriors, most of the rays will bounce straight to environment, and evaluate super quickly. So the reason VRED renders chrome so fast is not because it has optimization specifically for chrome, but because it uses simple no-diffuse, no-glossiness chrome material that is impossible to get slow with raytracing.

Here's an example of such chrome, rendered with V-Ray RT in CPU mode on i7 5930K. As you can see, it renders pretty much instantly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHUEcXOI5qI
(sorry about the music, i forgot i had recording with computer audio enabled)

[Dave_Wortley]

I haven't done a direct comparison yet as, that was just by gut instinct.

VRed has an intersting 'optimize geometry' button, I wonder what it actually does under the hood? It does improve speed quite a lot.

[kosso_olli]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHUEcXOI5qI
(sorry about the music, i forgot i had recording with computer audio enabled)

Dat music mate!
"You have to use Maya for that". Another sentence I really hate to hear. I am the only guy using 3dsMax here in my company, the other two are using Maya. I can do everything I need to do for my job out of the box, where the Maya guys have to use some fancy plugins or Mel scripts. And their software is slow as hell. Press render and it says "Updating frame at time 0" for 3 minutes before doing anything. Importing STEP or IGES? Useless in Maya... Anyway, lets not hijack this thread, users here need a simplified workflow for integrating renders into backplates+hdrs.

[LudvikKoutny]

Yup... well, I guess... now we wait

[piotrus3333]

turn MIS option in dome light off to prevent part of calculation from being done through GI.

[LudvikKoutny]

turn MIS option in dome light off to prevent part of calculation from being done through GI.

That's not really an option, as turning off MIS will make sampling of some effects, especially things like glossy reflections, far less efficient, resulting in longer rendertimes and noisier renders. Especially when doing Car renders, which is most frequent use case for matteshadow solution, MIS is crucial.

[piotrus3333]

its just more render time to clean the noise. MIS is sort of a hack to get faster/cleaner lighting. I sometimes turn it off to get gi and light passes more suitable for messing with lighting in post.

[LudvikKoutny]

its just more render time to clean the noise. MIS is sort of a hack to get faster/cleaner lighting. I sometimes turn it off to get gi and light passes more suitable for messing with lighting in post.

It's not "just" more render time to clean the noise. It's a significantly more rendertime to clean the noise :P. If I own V-Ray, and I've invested several years into learning how to use it efficiently, I expect it to perform optimally in all (or at least most of) circumstances. Lastly, MIS is not a hack, but absolutely essential optimization for any modern raytracer.

[piotrus3333]

well, MIS or no MIS I'm struggling with recreating this darkening of matte shadow catcher with GI. also GI from the backplate projected through matte obj seems to be ok.

setup is just dome light and backplate in max's environement slot. GI oversaturated.

problem I see is VRayLightSelect and VRayRawLighting showing matte obj.

[LudvikKoutny]

Here's as simple scene as it gets. Plane renders gray with GI on, but white (as it should) with GI off. Disabling MIS for dome light does not even help.

Have fun

MatteBug.zip

[piotrus3333]

GI environment override in VRay's env. You were getting light from backplate in mas environment. Override it with black.