V-Ray Suggestion: VFB - Real Time, Camera, Lens and Film Attributes

[squintnic]

i dont want vray to turn into magic bullet 5

[stevejjd]

i dont want vray to turn into magic bullet 5

Hi squintnic, Im glad for positive and negative feeback - is there anything at all, even 1 thing you like?

I don't want to see vray to turn into magic bullet 5 either.

[stevejjd]

Steve, any video to show what you are referring to in other renderers in this regard? Not the real-time bloom/glare but real-time camera, lens, and film attributes...I am trying to wrap my head around how it's different or significantly from loading desire LUTs manually either during or after rendering is done.

Love the idea of having some crucial tools around for artists to showcase renders without going through an actual comp process, but just trying to visualize how big of a difference your proposal would make.

Hi Jason,

yeah I really need to correct myself. As this discussion happens and people ask questions, it forces me to think about it more clearly. Sorry. Please feel more than free to really question my idea and if its bullshit just tell me.

Actually I was wandering if the film response could be made with a LUT. I may have confused those two. - I think Luts are trying to be film response curves but so many of them look really bad in V-Ray. If some natural looking LUTs could be made by Chaos group for V-Ray it would be really nice.

By lens profiles, I just mean the bloom and glare of a lens. Some lenses have different looking bloom, glare and flare. You could chose one like an anamorphic lens. and for that to happen real time if possible.


Very Important Corrections

- correction 01. I'm so sorry but as the conversation has happened here I don't exactly know what I mean by "Camera attributes". Realized that's already handled by the physical camera. "Dah" Sorry I wish I could delete that word from my posts. Just forget that word camera. Yeah I'm a bit embarrassed for that.
- correction 02. I think I may have realized that Film response curves are actually LUTs or could be done with a LUT. I was confused because I always thought of LUTs as "Instagraming" and not a response curve from a camera censor or from film stock. So forget Film response and replace with LUTs
- correction 03. Just cut the idea of film grain.

I'm really sorry,
I did make some passionate mistakes - I'm glad that many of you posed great questions - they forced me to think and some of what I wrote originally is a little bit bullshit. Please consider the corrections here. And please kick my idea right in the balls - I need your help to remove the shit parts and in the end, I hope there is at least 1 thing we all agree to be good.

So to clarify the proposal

01 - Better Bloom/Glare with chromatic aberration around highlights
03 - Proper LUTs made to work with V-Ray
02 - 'Filmic' color mapping as suggested by viscorbel

[Bigguns]

I agree with you'r 3 points, it's a minimum I thnik. Filmic was asking for a long time.. now corona has it.. and it have glare and bloom realtime too.. So vray getting it to keep up with competition is a must. And for the LUT thing, I totally agree. Us ,users , especially user working alone, I mean when vray is used in a production house, yes there is a guy that will take the pass send it into an other software, play with it, add LUTs correction etc etc.. he's specialised in this. But like me, and a lot of peoples using Vray, I'm alone, not a team, so I want to be able to have great render directly out of the VFB, just that simple

[Art48]

Near the start of the thread I read something about a live link to photoshop which would be totally awesome for me! Just dropping in to say this.

[Pixelab]

I've a hard time following this thread but IMO Vlado has summarized well

do we focus our efforts on making the render engine itself faster, more memory efficient and capable of handling a large variety of rendering situations ?

Yes ! Focus on what you do best.

Never understood the utility of VFB / Bloom / Glare etc. inside VRay, other programs do it better ? Then use other programs... what's the problem ?

[Alan Iglesias]

Never understood the utility of VFB / Bloom / Glare etc. inside VRay, other programs do it better ? Then use other programs... what's the problem ?

No real problem, I think. It's just that many of us are under the gun with time constraints and deadlines and a certain amount of basic, non-compositing post-processing right in Vray - using no other programs - would be a huge time saver.

Heck, as it is right now, I find the VFB to be incredibly useful. The fewer times a day I have to go to Pshop or Premiere the better - especially if I am not actually compositing the shot.

I heartily agree that the 3 issues listed here would be most welcome, and yes, if it means a bit of a slow-down in Vray's rendering development, no big deal as it would be temporary (to a degree at least). Also, the fact that Vray is a reasonably mature application might make this as good a time to do this as any.

The folks at Chaos Group have demonstrated time and time again over the years that they are as aggressive as anyone in their quest to keep Vray relevant and state-of-the-art, so I have no fears there.

Just my .02$

-Alan

[Kim Laughton]

Never understood the utility of VFB / Bloom / Glare etc. inside VRay, other programs do it better ? Then use other programs... what's the problem ?

I don't see why these specific camera effects are so different from the camera effects that we currently take for granted as a part of the render - motion blur and DOF. They're useful tools - without a certain amount of bloom/glare a bright light source generally looks wrong in an image, and until we're looking at images on very HDR screens that isn't going to go away.

Given that, I'd have thought it makes a lot of sense to have this built in to a renderer and updating as the image updates rather than popping into existence after the render stops.

[vlado]

So to summarize the thread, beyond the bloom and glare, which is coming anyways, and beyond perhaps baking of LUT transforms into the rendered image, do we need to do anything else for the time being?

Best regards,
Vlado

[stevejjd]

So to summarize the thread, beyond the bloom and glare, which is coming anyways, and beyond perhaps baking of LUT transforms into the rendered image, do we need to do anything else for the time being?

Best regards,
Vlado

The "'Filmic' color mapping" mentioned by viscorbel early in the post. I don't know how that would be implemented but I would love that

[vlado]

The "'Filmic' color mapping" mentioned by viscorbel early in the post. I don't know how that would be implemented but I would love that

We could do it, but it can be simulated with the Curve control as well. I know that some people disliked it generally. Also, there are several versions of the filmic tone mapping and I'm not sure which particular one you are interested in.

Best regards,
Vlado

[raymarcher]

I want the Instagram filters .

[Alan Iglesias]

...do we need to do anything else for the time being?

If you do not already plan it, some lens star effects would be real nice!

-Alan

[Nicinus]

My take is similar to Viscorbel, those effects that would greatly benefit from 32 bit space would be very helpful to have built in.

I just don't understand with a team and history such as Vray, Corona continually beats us to the punch with IPR, bloom and glare, Lightmix, etc? Typically there then is a discussion on the forums about a new thing, some people always says not in my personal workflow so we don't need it, Vlado feels it is not core render technology, and 6-12 months later after the topic refuses to die it gets implemented. Could we for once implement something user friendly first? Like the photoshop live link mentioned? PSD manager seems great but apparently does not support progressive renders, and no 2017 version yet so I can't test it, and this kind of compositing link with selection masks would really make sense to have integrated. I think the PSD developer will survive, he doesn't seem that active updating it.

[LudvikKoutny]

If you want to compete with streamlined post processing features of other renderers, then Photoshop live link would be very ineffective and unfortunate way of going about it.

First of all, it would not accommodate for vast majority of the things people want. It does not have any advanced glare solution, it doesn't have any CG friendly tone mapping, and most of all, it's extremely limited in terms of procedurality, let alone not being very fast in bitmap generating operations. So even if your render refined in realtime in Photoshop, it would likely not catch up very well. Also, anything Adobe-related is probably not worth investing into at the moment, considering it's starting to have some serious competition.

I would simply start with scraping down LensFX and doing a simple Corona/Octane/Fstorm style Glare. LensFX are based on some advanced technical paper, that does a lot more than a few primitive directional blur and color hue operations. In reward, LensFX is significantly slower, a lot harder to use, and most of all, fails at reproducing more than 95% of the glares generated by real cameras. It's a Loss/Loss/Loss/Loss scenario.

So I think it would be worth implementing a Glare generator that's a lot easier to implement, lot easier to use, lot faster, and generates glare effects that are lot closer to those captured by photo and video cameras.

About past year, I am noticing glares in all the TV series, Movies and Photography I watch. I don't think I've ever noticed a glare that had any prominent lens grating effect (that rippling LensFX has by default) and characteristics of the glares I observed were always something that could be achievable with Corona/Octane/Fstorm in just a few seconds with few clicks, or with LensFX after about half an hour of messing with trade-off between good looking glare and image bluriness, while also fiddling with very unintuitive external application, while still not getting it looking quite the way I want to.