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V-Ray for Blender improvements
Hi,
so I decided to try out V-Ray for blender since the licence comes basically free with my Max licence, and I use Blender occasionally for some tasks that 3ds Max sucks at. I was pleasantly surprised that it actually somehow works, so I am going to make a thread here about bug fixes and improvements that could eventually make V-Ray for Blender production ready one day.
So here's what I noticed so far...
Scary things:
- Embree is OFF by default :O
- When Embree is enabled, Low memory checkbox is ON by default, should be OFF by default.
- It still uses legacy defaults from V-Ray 2 era, namely wrong approach to linear workflow that makes rendering significantly slower. Color mapping mode needs to be set to color mapping only, and sRGB in VFB needs to be enabled by default.
- At every scene render (export) all VrayVFB settings are completely wiped and reset. Color correction adjustments, LUT, everything. Basically it makes changing anything in VFB completely pointless. And if you keep VFB open and run render again, it won't use that set up VFB, it will open completely new VFB with settings reset.
- No indication of rendering progress anywhere. Not in VFB, not in Blender, nowhere. You don't see how far your rendering is, how much time has passed, how much is remaining, etc...
Other problems:
Defaults in general:
- If Display mode set to Image Editor causes double rendering, and you are told in quick start guide to set it to Keep UI to prevent that, why not just make it default to keep UI?
- Max ray intensity is off by default, needs to be on by default
- Light solver should default to uniform probabilistic in 3.4, adaptive in case you move integration to 3.5
- Primary GI solver should default to Brute Force, not Irradiance Map
- Secondary GI solver should default to Light Cache
- Reflective caustics should be on by default, as V-Ray 3.3 and newer handle them more efficiently, almost for free.
- Light Cache has wrong defaults:
- - Retrace should be on by default and set to 2.0
- - Sample size should be 0.01 by default
- - Pre-filter samples should be on and default to 20
- - Use for glossy rays needs to be on by default
- - Adaptive sampling is deprecated, should not be present in UI anymore. It never worked.
- DMC sampler noise threshold should default to 0.005
- DMC tab should be renamed to sampling. V-Ray philosophy from 3.0 onwards should discourage users from ever touching DMC settings.
- Lanczos filter width should default to 2
- Max tree depth is now just 60, should be 80
- Face/level coefficient should default to 1.0, not 2.0
- Dome Light should have "Dome Spherical" on by default
- Dome Light should have affect alpha off by default
Other weird things:
- There seems to be way too many node spaces: For example there is V-Ray Node Tree space next to V-Ray Node Tree Editor space. What do I make out of that? Couldn't be at least few of those unified?
- Node editor spaces icons: Having V-Ray Logo slapped over every single icon makes those icons visually hard to read, and therefore they do not save to visual, nor muscle memory. I would make just plain icons without oblivious V-Ray logo over them, to make them easily readable. It took me a while to figure out that the icons actually display earth, light bulb and, uhhh.... a circle... ?
- There is no interactive rendering in V-Ray for blender, and no way to display environment map in the viewport because V-Ray's implementation of the world map breaks "World Background" checkbox in the display section of properties panel in the viewport. Therefore if I set up dome light, all I can do is to just rotate it randomly, without any visual feedback, launch the render and pray. There should be some way to interactively orient the environment map at least.
- User interfaces of lights and materials are extremely wonky, with layout appearing more or less random. Important artistic control settings are usually deep down buried under technical settings that should often remain completely untouched unless there is a very specific reason to do otherwise. Once I have some more time, I will create some photoshop mockups of at least how VrayMTL and VrayLights should look
- There is no render button in V-Ray VFB. Would be good to add one, which if pressed, would call back into blender to launch another render
I realize it is quite a list, so I hope it's not discouraging too much. I definitely see the potential, so I hope once these things are ironed out, V-Ray for Blender could become production-proof too. As far as I know, V-Ray for Maya started the same way. It had great potential, but it was gathering dust for a while because of lack of users' feedback.
Lastly, I have a question. I know that Blender's GPL licence is a PITA, but I am wondering, is there a chance that the exporter will become something more than just dumping of .vrscene file on the hard drive and then launching standalone? Something faster that could stream blender scene right into memory without going through the hard drive? Or will it, by the nature of GPL licence be always like this?
Thanks,
Ludvik
so I decided to try out V-Ray for blender since the licence comes basically free with my Max licence, and I use Blender occasionally for some tasks that 3ds Max sucks at. I was pleasantly surprised that it actually somehow works, so I am going to make a thread here about bug fixes and improvements that could eventually make V-Ray for Blender production ready one day.
So here's what I noticed so far...
Scary things:
- Embree is OFF by default :O
- When Embree is enabled, Low memory checkbox is ON by default, should be OFF by default.
- It still uses legacy defaults from V-Ray 2 era, namely wrong approach to linear workflow that makes rendering significantly slower. Color mapping mode needs to be set to color mapping only, and sRGB in VFB needs to be enabled by default.
- At every scene render (export) all VrayVFB settings are completely wiped and reset. Color correction adjustments, LUT, everything. Basically it makes changing anything in VFB completely pointless. And if you keep VFB open and run render again, it won't use that set up VFB, it will open completely new VFB with settings reset.
- No indication of rendering progress anywhere. Not in VFB, not in Blender, nowhere. You don't see how far your rendering is, how much time has passed, how much is remaining, etc...
Other problems:
Defaults in general:
- If Display mode set to Image Editor causes double rendering, and you are told in quick start guide to set it to Keep UI to prevent that, why not just make it default to keep UI?
- Max ray intensity is off by default, needs to be on by default
- Light solver should default to uniform probabilistic in 3.4, adaptive in case you move integration to 3.5
- Primary GI solver should default to Brute Force, not Irradiance Map
- Secondary GI solver should default to Light Cache
- Reflective caustics should be on by default, as V-Ray 3.3 and newer handle them more efficiently, almost for free.
- Light Cache has wrong defaults:
- - Retrace should be on by default and set to 2.0
- - Sample size should be 0.01 by default
- - Pre-filter samples should be on and default to 20
- - Use for glossy rays needs to be on by default
- - Adaptive sampling is deprecated, should not be present in UI anymore. It never worked.
- DMC sampler noise threshold should default to 0.005
- DMC tab should be renamed to sampling. V-Ray philosophy from 3.0 onwards should discourage users from ever touching DMC settings.
- Lanczos filter width should default to 2
- Max tree depth is now just 60, should be 80
- Face/level coefficient should default to 1.0, not 2.0
- Dome Light should have "Dome Spherical" on by default
- Dome Light should have affect alpha off by default
Other weird things:
- There seems to be way too many node spaces: For example there is V-Ray Node Tree space next to V-Ray Node Tree Editor space. What do I make out of that? Couldn't be at least few of those unified?
- Node editor spaces icons: Having V-Ray Logo slapped over every single icon makes those icons visually hard to read, and therefore they do not save to visual, nor muscle memory. I would make just plain icons without oblivious V-Ray logo over them, to make them easily readable. It took me a while to figure out that the icons actually display earth, light bulb and, uhhh.... a circle... ?
- There is no interactive rendering in V-Ray for blender, and no way to display environment map in the viewport because V-Ray's implementation of the world map breaks "World Background" checkbox in the display section of properties panel in the viewport. Therefore if I set up dome light, all I can do is to just rotate it randomly, without any visual feedback, launch the render and pray. There should be some way to interactively orient the environment map at least.
- User interfaces of lights and materials are extremely wonky, with layout appearing more or less random. Important artistic control settings are usually deep down buried under technical settings that should often remain completely untouched unless there is a very specific reason to do otherwise. Once I have some more time, I will create some photoshop mockups of at least how VrayMTL and VrayLights should look
- There is no render button in V-Ray VFB. Would be good to add one, which if pressed, would call back into blender to launch another render
I realize it is quite a list, so I hope it's not discouraging too much. I definitely see the potential, so I hope once these things are ironed out, V-Ray for Blender could become production-proof too. As far as I know, V-Ray for Maya started the same way. It had great potential, but it was gathering dust for a while because of lack of users' feedback.
Lastly, I have a question. I know that Blender's GPL licence is a PITA, but I am wondering, is there a chance that the exporter will become something more than just dumping of .vrscene file on the hard drive and then launching standalone? Something faster that could stream blender scene right into memory without going through the hard drive? Or will it, by the nature of GPL licence be always like this?
Thanks,
Ludvik
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