First project with Vray, and here's are some things I found.

[brian_henry]

My first project with Vray. I want to disclaim that I'm using a scene in this project that is old and converted from a previous version of VRay to my version (6.20). It's also my first time using it, and although I followed a bunch of documentation, there is certianly things I don't know about that could be causing my issues, so if you see anything here that sounds like inexperience, educate me!

Things that seem like bugs:

• Turning on DOF and Motion Blur an the Physical Camera tag consistently removes bitmap textures from objects in the scene I was using (maybe has something to do with instances?)
• Parenting a decal to a mesh that distorts (using a bend in this case) appears to stay in place in the viewport, but doesn't when rendered. I found a work aroud with using a cloner tool tied to a point selection, but sure would be nice if it worked how you'd expect and how the viewport displays it.
• Distributed rendering often just ends abruptly without error on remote machines and stalls the current bucket for that machine on the host. The render stalls and doesn't continue. Maybe there's a way to not stall the render and pass the stalled bucket on to another machine? I lost a couple nights of rendering from this, and found if I'm going to use distributed render I have to babysit it.

Features I would implement:

• The ability to refresh the image in a background layer in the VFB. In this project I was changeing the file I was using as the background image and it wouldn't update, even if I re-selected it.
• The ability to export the VFB display correction layers as render elements (to layers in EXR)
• If a machine crashes or locks up on a distributed render, don't stall the render. Hand the buckets off to another machine.
• Make it easy to just output one solo render element.
• Move displacement to a material node instead of a tag. I still can't figure out how to use c4d vray displacement properly. Anyone have a tutorial?

[wolfgang_himmelfarb]

[*]Move displacement to a material node instead of a tag. I still can't figure out how to use c4d vray displacement properly. Anyone have a tutorial?[/LIST]

I'm here to commiserate 100p. We are all hoping this makes it in for the Vray7 update. Its also in the "ideas portal" so you can go vote for it there too. I'm curious what specifically are you having issues with in regards to displacement. I work off of the documentation but also there are some general resources I use too. 2D disp is straightforward and less memory intensive if you uv unwrap(no overrides). Displacement surfaces made up of Blending maps, using vertex maps, uv transforms, mapping channels are all particularly painful because of the node/tag separation, but it's doable. I just requires jumping back and forth between your material and disp tag.

[zhanet.georgieva]

Hi brian_henry,

Thank you for sharing your experience and feedback with V-Ray.

Regarding the issues you're facing:

• DOF and Motion Blur removing bitmap textures: I wasn’t able to reproduce this issue on my end. Could you let us know your exact versions of V-Ray and Cinema 4D? Also, sharing a simple scene with your setup or a video demonstrating the problem would be really helpful in pinpointing what might be going wrong.
• Decal parenting issue: A similar issue has been discussed in this forum thread. If your case is different, feel free to clarify and share a simple scene with the setup. We’d be happy to take a closer look.
• Distributed rendering stalling: This will require further investigation. Could you clarify if this happens with any scene or only with a specific one? Are you rendering with V-Ray or V-Ray GPU? Please provide the exact versions of Cinema 4D and V-Ray running on each machine (note that all machines in the DR should have matching V-Ray versions). Additionally, sharing the hardware specifications of each machine would be helpful, and you might also want to compare the performance of each machine by running the V-Ray Benchmark.
  
  If you'd prefer, you can share the requested information and scenes here in the forum, or submit a request in our support system, where you can share everything privately for investigation.

For the features you suggested, I encourage you to submit them in our Ideas Portal or vote for existing requests. This is the best way to let our Development Team know what's important to you and other users.

[brian_henry]

DOF & Motion blur issue: C4D version 2024.5.1, VRay version 6.20.02. I'd send you this scene but it's 3.2gb.Maybe that has something to do with it, but I know it was happening on both an RTX3080 and an RTX4090 so I thought it probably wasn't a VRAM issue. I haven't had time to troubleshoot it further, and unfortunately don't have time to gather more info for you.
Decal Parenting issue: That's me in that other forum thread. I've attached a simple scene that shows what I'm talking about. The decal is parented to the cube and moves with it when bent (just adjust the bend strength) in the viewport, but the decal doesn't follow in the render.
Distributed rendering stalling: This happens with multiple scenes that I've tried rendering. c4d isnt on the distributed machine, just the vray render server, and they're v6 update 2.1. Specs are i7, 32GB RAM, RTX3080, on wifi

[zhanet.georgieva]

Hi brian_henry,

Regarding the DoF and Motion Blur issue, I tested this with a simple scene and couldn’t reproduce the problem as described. It may be specific to your scene setup. To help us understand the issue better, you could share a video demonstrating the problem or the scene file when convenient. Ideally, sharing the entire scene with all assets would be best, or even a simpler version where the issue is reproducible.

As for the Decal issue mentioned in the other thread, this is expected behavior, as V-Ray Decals currently do not support Mesh Deformers in Cinema 4D. If you'd like, you can submit this as a feature request in the Ideas Portal.

For the final issue regarding the Decal, could you please share:

• - Logs from the local machine running the DR. You can view these in the Cinema 4D console.
• - Logs from the other machine, located here: C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Temp.