Product Suggest: Arnold render view - Debug Shading & Arnold Light Groups for V-Ray

[stevejjd]

Hello,

I just had a look at the Arnold render engine in Maya and its really good.

As a 3ds max Vray user I would love to see some implementation of the Arnold render view > Debug Shading, specifically the Isolation mode.

I would love the isolation mode. It shows you the rendered result of a selected shader node.

Lets say you are doing look dev for skin and you have a few nodes in a skin shading network.....you can just click isolation debugging and select any nod in the shader tree and it will render only that.

very usefull

for a practacal exsample you can refer to how debugging is used in this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v6OWgaESkc&t=955s

mind you, its 40 min long but you can skip to the parts regarding the use of debugging.

maybe V-Ray could render them as passes?

Or maybe you could pick multiple nodes in a shader tree that you want to debug and it will render it as a pass.


Please refer to this alsurface skin shading tutorial.
http://www.anderslanglands.com/alshaders/tut_skin1.html


Notice how in arnold you can select lights and make them a render pass? - but is as if they are rendered sepperatly.

I think that would be cool if V-Ray could do that



Thanks.

Steve ~

[pg1]

Soulburn scripts TexmapPreview kinda lets you do this already in 3ds but yep it would be nice if it was integrated more directly.

love those arnold vids, so informative and very applicable to Vray, in many ways Arnold seems to have copied Vray or maybe visa versa?

[stevejjd]

Yeah, I saw that script and as you pointed out, its not so smoothly integrated.

In following those Arnold Tutorials I could see that Arnold users really enjoy a lot of features here and there that can make lookdev so much better. The main features I think would help would be:

Debugging - I am particularly interested in isolate selected.
Light groups - A way of selecting lights and seeing what their individual contribution is as if there were separate renders.


Those tutorials are really great in terms of methodically tuning individual values. Really good, I will apply those methods to V-Ray look dev.

[Syclone1]

With the light groups, cant you use the V-Ray Light Select render element?

[stevejjd]

Thanks I will try that but Im not sure its the same.

[Alex_M]

Interesting video, thanks for sharing. I think Vlado mentioned that complete light select feature is coming in Vray 3.6 (next month I think?) so we'll be able to see the full contribution of individual (or groups of) lights and extract these passes to get a "light mixer" kind of functionality, albeit still not integrated in the VFB itself with sliders and whatnot. Check his post here.

Yes, isolating individual nodes/parts of your material tree is the bomb. At the moment I just plug them in a VrayLightMtl to check their individual effect but it's kind of slow and clunky.

[stevejjd]

Cool Cool

[jasonhuang1115]

Yes, isolating individual nodes/parts of your material tree is the bomb. At the moment I just plug them in a VrayLightMtl to check their individual effect but it's kind of slow and clunky.

Would like to raise this thread again. It would be very handy, during IPR, to see the shading effect on your lookdev-ing object based on the selected node in the shading tree to see that up to "this point" of the tree, what does it look like. Not just debugging, but also easier to dial in parameters as lots of times it's much harder to see what a texture/procedural noise/pattern is doing to the shading of the object. Huge boost on the efficiency of lookdev.

[joconnell]

I do the same thing using a lot of the various elements. You've your diffuse filter map for colour, mt reflect glossiness to see the level your soft reflections are at and then the reflection filter map for overall reflection strength. As someone mentioned Neil blevins texmap preview is great for this, I tend to use the extra tex element with whatever map I'm tweaking loaded or use a vray light material override with the map loaded in there and everything else off.

[jasonhuang1115]

Thanks for the input, John. Most of the stuff is a bit foreign to me as I don't quite speak Max. Are you saying you can pretty achieve the same thing already in Max? If I understand correctly, you are counting on additional render elements and Neil's texmap preview, which seems a bit different from the workflow shown in video. The workflow shown in the video basically showing that you don't need to do any additional material/texture assignment or override to visualize shading effect, up to selected nodes in the tree, on the object right in the render view window (VFB or what not).

I will probably this request in the Maya forum.