Why does Vray rebuild most of the vop nodes instead of just support them ?

[Jon3D]

Hi,

While I enjoy working with vray in Houdini, some things feels a little bit strange to me.

It seems the idea is more to rebuild most of the utility nodes instead to support the ones that are actually there and work pretty well. The following thoughts are from an artist perspective. I am no developer. So it may be that I think of some things to be simple, which they arent in development so sorry for that in advance.

e.g.

Instead of one "bind" node I have a "userColor" / "userFloat" / "userInteger" node. As Houdini I ask myself immediately: "I want to use my beloved bind node that imports all attributes on my geometry !!" , "Integer is for all integers I guess. Float for all floats. And than Color instead of Vector. Can I import now only colors with the userColor or any kind of vector?"

Whouldn´t it be better to just support the heavily used bind node which can import all attribute types?

There is also an vector to color node. In Houdini I can use any vector as color and vice versa. There is not really a difference between vector data and color data right? Do I have to convert a vector to a color before using it as color?

We have the "floatoperations" and "vectoroperations" nodes instead of supporting the utility nodes that are already there.

There is a "floattocolor" node. The already existing "floattovec" node gives much more control about the individual components you want to change.

Support for the nice "fit" node would also be nice. ( I know there is the remap node. I dont want you to disable it )

I hope you get me right. I like rendering with vray in houdini but It would be nice to have support for all that utility stuff which is already there and works quite well.


cheers
Jon

[bdancer]

So, there is no way to support any of native nodes.
The main reason for that is that you'll expect to support all nodes not like "bind" node only, right?
And we'll have to support all inputs of those nodes simply because V-Ray is not Mantra.
That's why we have our own nodes.
V-Ray nodes represent UI of V-Ray plugins that are actually working with V-Ray internal data structures.

> have support for all that utility stuff which is already there and works quite well

Well, it's not "already there", it's already there for Mantra, for us all Houdini nodes are just UI, there is no way to sample data from them.

> Do I have to convert a vector to a color before using it as color?

When you'll connect vector to color the connection line will become dashed - that means that data will be converted internally.
If line will become red then some manual conversion node will be required.

> I hope you get me right.

There is for sure some room for improvement, like we may try making a single user node instead of 3 or better menu / attributes labels.

[Jon3D]

Hey bdancer,

Thank you for your answer. It makes sense to me.
If I use vray for Max e.g. I also use normal max maps like bitmap, composite map, output map, color correction you name it. All these are max maps and work with vray. So maybe because of that in mind I was expecting this to work.

To redesign some nodes like you said combining the userColor nodes etc. to one node for binding all attibute types whould be nice improvement I think.

cheers
Jon