Substance Materials

[wolfgang_himmelfarb]

I understand that vray now supports sbsar files via the substance loader. I gave it a try and its awesome that you can set color space and its 32 bit depth(3.7 had neither), however all the maps just preview black? Shows up in the render but no preview? Is there something i have to set?

[bozhidar_ivanov]

Hi wolfgang_himmelfarb,
Unfortunately at the moment there are no previews for Substances nodes(or other nodes that are connected to it) as that would have caused freezes or crashes when rendering a preview. Our hope is that at some point in the future we will also have access to the new Substance engine in Cinema4D that Redshift is using and the whole workflow will be improved.

[wolfgang_himmelfarb]

ah, material preview rendering claims another victim. It is for sure vray for cinema's achilles heel, from the beginning. Recently a user even suggested that vray uses the native cinema render to generate material previews. Anyhow I pray this is a priority and its become the only thing I care about every time there is a new release, even the major ones. I really appreciate the response and am otherwise very impressed with the implementation.

[bozhidar_ivanov]

What are your main problems with previews? Is it the speed at which they render? Is it Cinema4D freezing while rendering previews or something else? We have mainly been focusing on node materials and for V-Ray 7.0 we tried to improve the speed and fidelity of node viewport previews and I hope that's at least noticeable. For the node editor previews and material manager thumbnails there's still some minor things we can do although the main problem might just be their quality. Without GI and quality set to 1 in preferences they are quite fast and look decent, although the absence of GI might significantly change the way some previews render.