VRay and the new Bifrost Graph system

[ricoholmes]

Hello folks,

Well the new Bifrost system has been out and available for a couple of months now and I was just wondering what the plans / road map are for VRay integration ?
Obviously Autodesk has integrated it directly with Arnold, but what sort of efforts have they made for third party renderers ? Are non-Arnold users just shafted, basically ?

When doing poly/fluid work: currently the only way I see to do this is in Vray * is to mesh the results and convert it to mayaMesh via the node editor. This is obviously a major handicap not being able to render particles etc, not to mention current problems with motion blur vectors on meshes.


Evaluating our current DCC's and Renderers at the moment. (C4D+Redshift or Maya+Vray)
We've always loved VRay, and Maya's new Bifrost has SO much promise. But is that promise just promise ?

/RH

*Redshift, Octane as well, to be fair.

[oglu]

Meshing or VDB is tue only option right now.
I fear there is no API its impossible for Chausgroup to support it native.

[stezza]

I guess it would compete with Phoenix anyway. Depending on the project sometimes you just have to use Arnold.

[ricoholmes]

I guess it would compete with Phoenix anyway.

Oh not necessarily. Phoenix is phenomenal for the jobs it's meant for.
The simulation aspects of Bifrost graph are only one area of its utility. There is SO much other utility in it (programmatic modelling, strands, mo-graph etc)

[Mihail.Djurev]

It's in our roadmap to improve our Bifrost support. Can't say when yet, but probably mid next year.

[ricoholmes]

But that's 3 million years away!

Silliness aside, thank you for the heads-up there Mihail, much appreciated. It makes it easier to justify investing time learning the new system knowing that it'll be adopted by Vray rather than solely accessible by the Arnold crowd.

[radvfx]

Well, it's 3 million years later, and I am fairly new to the bifrost-V-ray issue, but I've managed to get some things renders, but I still run into issues once--n-a-while and would love some help.
The first one is that I do not seem to be able to create velocity renders. I imagine this is because the geometry is changing per frame, but perhaps there is a velocity value contained in the particles
that I could use and pass to a V-Ray shader through a VRayUserScalar and VRayUserColor utility. Thoughts?

Second, I've had some issues trying to render directly using the Vray Frame Buffer because I keep getting the error for my fluid when rendering multiple frames "Fatal error: Invalid VDB stream."
Typically, frame 1 renders fine and frame two fails in the manner.

Funny thing, the foam geometry renders fine, but the liquid does not.

I was able to get a liquid to render previously, but I do not see the settings for meshing/rendering being different. This is something else.

I have simmed everything, cached the liquid, mesh and solid.

This has been all created with the BiFrost Fluids menu, and I have yet to create any of is with the BiFrost Node System.

Likely, my next thing to learn.


-----------
Maya/Bifrost 2019
Mac OSX Mojave 10.14.6
V-Ray Next for Maya, update 2.1 (v4.30.01 frame Jan 21 2020).


- Jimbo

[oglu]

Bifrost is still under heavy development. There is no final API there is no final Redner SDK.
They still change a lot under the hood. I fear it will take an other year until we see a Render SDK.

[oglu]

Jason wrote a little sript for me to convert Bif Objects to Maya Geo.
Maybe from help.
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/bifro.../9716484#M2861