Rendering in background

[kubbek]

It would be great to have an option to render in background so you can work on a scene while render is running. Now I set up V-Ray so that render runs only on a slave machine but nevertheless modo is locked till render finishes. I would like to be also able to set rendering for half of my cores and can work on a scene that is being rendered or open new document and work on it. Now I would have to start new modo instance that is not convenient and not always stable.

Best,
Jakub

[vladimir.nedev]

I think the best (most stable) way to do this would be to add commands within V-Ray for MODO for rendering with V-Ray Standalone (V-Ray for 3ds Max and Nuke already have these).
Basically V-Ray for MODO will export a .vrscene to a temporary location and start V-Ray Standalone as a separate process.
You can check on the render progress while still working on the same or another scene within MODO.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[kubbek]

I think the best (most stable) way to do this would be to add commands within V-Ray for MODO for rendering with V-Ray Standalone (V-Ray for 3ds Max and Nuke already have these).
Basically V-Ray for MODO will export a .vrscene to a temporary location and start V-Ray Standalone as a separate process.
You can check on the render progress while still working on the same or another scene within MODO.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

Sounds good. Modo itself is not very stable under load...

[vladimir.nedev]

The last nightly builds ( 2016.03.30 ) have a "Render with V-Ray Standalone" command.

It will export the MODO scene to a .vrscene (to either the user's temp folder or to a specified location).
It also creates a .bat (or .command file on Mac OS X) that invokes the V-Ray standalone executable on the exported .vrscene file.
This .bat files is then executed. The command has an option whether the .vrscene and .bat file should be deleted after rendering is finished (enabled by default).

Here is how the UI looks :



Here is the global preference that defines the default path for saving .vrscene files:



This command actually enables rendering animations with RT GPU. I've tested simple animations on the following and they seem to work fine:
- camera transformation
- mesh transformation
- mesh deformation (note that the deforming mesh needs to be stored in the .vrscene file for each frame of the animation. If the mesh uses MODO sub-division, enabling V-Ray sub-division (either native or OpenSubd) from the V-Ray Geometry Properties, can reduce the export time to .vrscene a lot, as well as reduce the .vrscene file size. This is because enabling either of these causes V-Ray for MODO to store only the sub-division cage).
- light intensity
- light deformation (changing the width/height of an area light)
- light transformation

Animating material properties doesn't seem to work with RT GPU in this particular setup. Probably a bug in V-Ray standalone, since RT GPU handles materials a little differently than the CPU renderer.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[BVA]

This works really well! I especially like the option to use half of the workstation cores while the DR do the rest of the work! Thanks

One question, would it be possible to save out layered exr files. Same goes for adding a filename under the "Final Color output". I don't see the option to save layered files?

[vladimir.nedev]

This works really well! I especially like the option to use half of the workstation cores while the DR do the rest of the work! Thanks

One question, would it be possible to save out layered exr files. Same goes for adding a filename under the "Final Color output". I don't see the option to save layered files?

I've added Multi-channel 16 and 32 bit EXR formats for tomorrow's nightly build ( 2016.04.02 ).
This applies only to the "Render with V-Ray Standalone" command.
I am not sure, if it is possible to add new formats to the "Final Color Output", I might investigate this in the future.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[BVA]

Thanks Vladimir