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  • Vray, PTex and other things

    We are a fairly new customer to V-Ray for maya and I must say i like the quality of the render engine when it works quite a bit, the problem I find is with the documentation that seems to be incomplete and sort of neglected for a product that is commercial and not a hobby app.

    Where is a proper PTex workflow described in the manual ? I figured out how to get ptex images loaded and rendered but there is nothing in the manual that describes their use with displacements which do not seem to be working for many other people online.

    There is very little info on how to properly deal with vector displacements that are coming from applications such as mud box. The feature is there but without any example scenes shipping with v-ray to showcase it's features and common setups it's not much use. Google searches return some discussions on the web of people having similar issues and no real answers. Once again, acceptable problem to be having with experimental open source software but not with a commercial product that should have it's features well documented with example scenes or mini tutorials to show how a base setup is done for a particular feature.

    In general, and this is not just the case with VRay, i find that the industry trend more and more is to deliver generally unstable and half implemented technologies that are advertised to work in a production setting. This is very dangerous to smaller studios that put their reputation on the line by relying on a product that claims to do this or that but actually does not fully function the way it should. Working on tight deadlines does not allow for a lot of experimentation and it takes a lot of time to figure out all the bugs a new application has before one can sort of navigate around them to get the job done.

    If the VRay developers are listening, please update the manual or put together a series of tutorials or a comprehensive list of features that work, don't fully work or don't work at all but are in the app anyway. Thanks a lot and hopefully the product continues to improve witch each new update.

  • #2
    Originally posted by nookie View Post
    Where is a proper PTex workflow described in the manual ? I figured out how to get ptex images loaded and rendered but there is nothing in the manual that describes their use with displacements which do not seem to be working for many other people online.
    We don't have an established PTex workflow at the moment. The concept for PTex is still fairly new and there are things that are not clear to us as well.

    There is very little info on how to properly deal with vector displacements that are coming from applications such as mud box.
    We are working on a short tutorial for that.

    While I understand your frustration with the lack of tutorials, I'm afraid a phase of research will always be required - you can't always hope that someone would have gone through and described in detail exactly the workflow that you need. Part of the reason that V-Ray is a very powerful product is that it allows you to do things in many different ways.

    In general, and this is not just the case with VRay, i find that the industry trend more and more is to deliver generally unstable and half implemented technologies that are advertised to work in a production setting.
    One could argue that this is because customers require new features at a rate for which it is impossible to implement and test them to a sufficient degree.

    Best regards,
    Vlado
    I only act like I know everything, Rogers.

    Comment


    • #3
      Originally posted by vlado View Post
      We don't have an established PTex workflow at the moment. The concept for PTex is still fairly new and there are things that are not clear to us as well.

      We are working on a short tutorial for that.

      While I understand your frustration with the lack of tutorials, I'm afraid a phase of research will always be required - you can't always hope that someone would have gone through and described in detail exactly the workflow that you need. Part of the reason that V-Ray is a very powerful product is that it allows you to do things in many different ways.

      One could argue that this is because customers require new features at a rate for which it is impossible to implement and test them to a sufficient degree.

      Best regards,
      Vlado
      I appreciate you responding, and yes I realize research is always part of the process, but all i'm saying is that it would be nice to have example setups for features included with the software or as an additional download. I'm sure while the software is being written you must test if a feature is even working to begin with and the setups you do for that would even be nice for people to dissect. While there are many ways to do the same thing there are still workflows that have worked during testing vs workflows that have been untested or not tried.

      As far as customers requiring new features at to fast a rate, that will always happen and I do see that being a problem. I would also argue that sales people will always tell the developers "we need this" because company X has it on their feature list. Not every customer will agree but i rather have fewer features that work and are proven to work than untested or half implemented features that turn out to be a stumbling block half way through production.

      Going back to P-Tex, if there is no established workflow yet, what was actually tried out during development that did work ? Were vector displacement maps through ptex tried out at all ? How about regular normal displacements ? Any info on this would be great.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by nookie View Post
        Going back to P-Tex, if there is no established workflow yet, what was actually tried out during development that did work?
        We tried using PTex files for colors, regular displacement, and bump mapping.

        Were vector displacement maps through ptex tried out at all?
        No. Vector displacement requires UV coordinates to determine the correct displacement directions. By their nature though, PTex files have no UV coordinates. There may be a convention for interpreting vector displacements for PTex files, but it is not discussed in the PTex specification and we had no way to deduce what it was. There are a number of ways to go about it, and we didn't know how the different painting applications would approach this. If you have any information about this, it would be very helpful.

        How about regular normal displacements?
        They were tested and found to work fine with the examples provided with the PTex library.

        Best regards,
        Vlado
        I only act like I know everything, Rogers.

        Comment


        • #5
          Here is a short tutorial on rendering regular (non-PTex) vector displacement with V-Ray for Maya:
          http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/maya...splacement.htm

          Best regards,
          Vlado
          I only act like I know everything, Rogers.

          Comment

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