Passgroups and Passes

[7enith]

Hello Vladimir,

just playing with Vray all day long, its really cool. I especially dig the hair and skin shaders and I really love that everything works so similar like the standard Modo workflow, great work!! But there´s one powerful feature group that I´m not sure if that can be used with vray, and these are passes/passgroups.

They are especially useful if you want to break up your render into individual parts for compositing,
or if you want to try different design variations,
or if you have for example a row of different cell phone models each with different cameras and you want them to render in one go. Well quite useful it is)

Will Vray support these? Or can it do that already?


Thanks and all the best!
Christian

[vladimir.nedev]

I think the render passes are supported automatically. I haven't done anything in my code specifically for passes support.
Switching between render passes even seems to work in RT in my simple tests.
For V-Ray for MODO, when you change between passes, it is as if the individual channel values, defined in the render pass, are being changed.

What we don't have currently is an equivalent of MODO's Render -> Render passes... command which renders all passes in one "pass group" one after the other.
Also we don't support the "Output pattern" from MODO's Render item, including the "<pass>" tag.
These are the things I need to eventually implement.
But apart from that, you should be able to define passes, and then render and save them one by one.
Not as convenient as the Render passes... command in MODO, but still useful.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[vladimir.nedev]

What we don't have currently is an equivalent of MODO's Render -> Render passes... command which renders all passes in one "pass group" one after the other.

This is fixed for today's nightly build ( 2016.08.09 ).
The Render with V-Ray and Render animation with V-Ray commands now have an option to select a Render Pass Group.
The Render with V-Ray Standalone command will get this option separately later on.



All enabled render passes in the group will be rendered one after the other.
The whole animation range for one pass is rendered before starting the next pass.
The MODO scene is reexported from scratch for each pass, so there are no restrictions on what channels can be changed in the pass (resolution, render camera, layer visiblity, etc).

The pass name is added with a . before it, to the end of the saved image file specified in the Final Color Output.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[pixelwerk]

Are there any plans adding this feature to the "Render with V-Ray standalone" as well? I have to render around 30 passes today and i find it pretty convenient to "outsource" this task to the standalone-version and rendering it with hosts-only, while continue working on the main computer.

[vladimir.nedev]

Are there any plans adding this feature to the "Render with V-Ray standalone" as well? I have to render around 30 passes today and i find it pretty convenient to "outsource" this task to the standalone-version and rendering it with hosts-only, while continue working on the main computer.

Yes, as you requested in the other thread.
But it won't be ready today for sure.

Also, it will create one full .vrscene for each render pass, so it may take quite a bit of disk space.

I was thinking of another feature, "render all pass combinations".
When you have it enabled, V-Ray for MODO will render all combinations of passes between different pass groups.
For example, let's say you have 3 render pass groups, each with 3 passes, say 3 different cameras, 3 different materials and 3 different light conditions.
"Render all pass combinations" will render out 27 (3*3*3) images.
Not sure if that's something that people would find useful.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[pixelwerk]

Yes, as you requested in the other thread.
But it won't be ready today for sure.

Of course not...wasn't meant like that. Was just to illustrate, that it's a feature that's useful more than once in a year, and how awesome the feature "render only with hosts" is.
What you're describing is exactly what i had to tackle. 3 different cameras with 3 different positions with 4 different models, so it's definitely a useful feature!

And about disk-space: Disk space is nowadays one of the cheaper parts in a rendering-pipeline and i guess the rendered images at the end will use by far more disk-space then the .vrscenes, no matter how complex the scene is

[rkoonce]

Is it possible to specify the renderer in a pass?

That is, can I have one pass that uses Modo renderer & other passes that use V-Ray?

[vladimir.nedev]

Is it possible to specify the renderer in a pass?

That is, can I have one pass that uses Modo renderer & other passes that use V-Ray?

No, that's not possible.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[aluxado]

Yes, as you requested in the other thread.
But it won't be ready today for sure.

Also, it will create one full .vrscene for each render pass, so it may take quite a bit of disk space.

I was thinking of another feature, "render all pass combinations".
When you have it enabled, V-Ray for MODO will render all combinations of passes between different pass groups.
For example, let's say you have 3 render pass groups, each with 3 passes, say 3 different cameras, 3 different materials and 3 different light conditions.
"Render all pass combinations" will render out 27 (3*3*3) images.
Not sure if that's something that people would find useful.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

This was something that was doing the external kit "Passify" by Adam OHern. I've tried the plugin with the last Modo version (at the moment 12.1v1) and when you try to combine the passes it crashes. Will be nice to have this feature implemented in a next Vray for Modo version..