Shader editor feature queries

[joe_henton]

Hi,

I've been experimenting this evening with creating shaders and had a few questions.

Are there any plans to allow users to preview specific selected nodes? For instance, when I connect a "Color Correction" node attached to a "Bitmap" into the "Material Output" node, my object turns white instead of displaying the color.

Additionally, will V-Ray support functionality with Blender's Node Wrangler add-on in the future?

Lastly, are there plans to enable native Blender nodes to work with V-Ray, similar to how Maya allows the use of its native shader nodes within a V-Ray shader?

Thank you!

[shaio]

Hey joe_henton,

In terms of plans anything suggested by you guys is could potentially go in our to-do list.

Are there any plans to allow users to preview specific selected nodes? For instance, when I connect a "Color Correction" node attached to a "Bitmap" into the "Material Output" node, my object turns white instead of displaying the color.

Currently no, but I'll add this in our to-do list so we can go back and see what we can do about this in the future. It surely sounds like a useful functionality to have so you can isolate a specific part of the shader tree and preview it.

Additionally, will V-Ray support functionality with Blender's Node Wrangler add-on in the future?

We've been looking into this at some point we found some things that might prevent us from doing this. It's more or less related to the python API that V-Ray is build and relaying on. I'm going to double check this with the dev team since it was quite some time ago.

Lastly, are there plans to enable native Blender nodes to work with V-Ray, similar to how Maya allows the use of its native shader nodes within a V-Ray shader?

This one is a difficult one to answer. In theory yes we can support them.

One way is take the Blender node and then we look for alternative V-Ray plugin (or node) that could be a potential equivalent. Then if such equivalent exist what we do is during rendering we translate the parameters from the blender node to the V-Ray one and so it could be rendered. The drawback of this approach is that most of the times there are differences in t when you compare the rendered results from the Blender node to the V-Ray one.

The other solution is to write the exact same Blender node as a new V-Ray node and then do the translation from method one. This way we can achieve the same results when comparing the blender render to the V-Ray one. The drawback is the time that takes to write this Blender node and the translation to V-Ray. So if we do this it would probably be some time in the distant future. Can you please share some example nodes you'd like to see support for since V-Ray has quite big variety of nodes and there might already be alternative to the nodes you're looking for?