Aggressive Sliders

[Travis Serio_cg]

I am sure someone has to have said this already but wow, can we tone down the slider min change values across the entire UI?

Example: If you drag any slider in the UI the value adjustments are super aggressive. Can we get some snap points or some more simplistic ranges? Making a small adjustment generally means going from 1 to some extreme value like 215.21340134132 That's not super useful and almost always ends up in typing desired values in the boxes.

[Peter.Chaushev]

I agree, there is definitely a lot of room for improvement.
There are plans for improving the sliders design. However, at this point I don't have anything to share with you yet.
Thank you for posting this. Please share your thoughts if you there is anything else in our UI which bothers you.

Kind regards,
Peter

[mgibeault]

Sliders as they are now are not intuitive because we often don't know where the range comes from.
I understand that there may be two very different usable ranges for one slider, like for an interior scene a range could be 0 to 10 while the same slider could have a range of 0-1000 for an exterior scene. The tooltip is often helpful but not always and it's not context-sensitive (the message won't change if there's an active sun or not for example).
A slider that resets if we enter a number outside of its current range is cool but we need more guidance as to what is expected.

[Travis Serio_cg]

Thanks for the reply, Peter.

Overall the UI is a significant improvement over the previous UI. I would say that the only other major area where im like "this could be flushed out better" is the concept of how Drag/Drop is only partially implemented. For example if you open the material library pane in the vismated you are presented with a work flow that wants you to drag materials from a library folder into the scene materials area. However that's where drag and drop stops. So as a user my next assumption is that I should be able to drag and drop Back to the library to export a material to that library after I have made changes, Or... Drag and drop the material onto a document object to assign the material. Since neither of those things are implemented it presents a confusing path to the user as the proper way to interact with the tool. It's like do i drag and drop or click, or right click or what?

Anyway, hopefully that made sense. All of the pieces for success are there, they just need to be refined better and more fully.

Another annoying thing is the vismated window stays top most and file open / save dialogs tend to get stuck behind it and are some times hard to fish back out to the top. That could use some improvement.

Setting the render output to match the Viewport dimensions is pretty much broken IMO. The fact that we now have to push a button to make it update is soul crushing. That should really just work like it used to.

And, to beat the dead horse... please bring back some of the more advanced controls that were in the previous version. This watered down thing has crushed a decade of workflow and material creation for me, or at least made it pretty hard. I've found myself editing materials in notepad at times.

[Peter.Chaushev]

Sliders as they are now are not intuitive because we often don't know where the range comes from.(...)

The problem with defining narrower slider ranges is that every scene is unique and often that might impede functionality in some edge cases. The min. and max. values allowed are usually defined

(...) The tooltip is often helpful but not always and it's not context-sensitive (the message won't change if there's an active sun or not for example).
A slider that resets if we enter a number outside of its current range is cool but we need more guidance as to what is expected.

Context-sensitive tooltips are not possible at this time. The UI, however, is adaptive based on render mode, animation setup, etc. It does not display options not relevant to the current setup.
Improving descriptions is an always ongoing task. If you find any description or label uninformative or misleading, please let me know.

(...) how Drag/Drop is only partially implemented.

This is something the developers would like to enhance in a future update. Introducing drag&drop functionality to more aspects of the UI, however, is not an easy task.

(...) Another annoying thing is the vismated window stays top most and file open / save dialogs tend to get stuck behind it and are some times hard to fish back out to the top. That could use some improvement. (...)

This will be improved in v3.6.

(...) Setting the render output to match the Viewport dimensions is pretty much broken IMO. The fact that we now have to push a button to make it update is soul crushing. That should really just work like it used to. (...)

Manually updating Match Viewport actually is the safest way to do this, as it prevents the occurrence of multiple issues. The workflow we recommend is to use a predefined aspect ratio (and safe frames enabled) based on the image composition and print size you want to have in your final render. Improving 'Match Viewport' further is not on our priority list.

And, to beat the dead horse... please bring back some of the more advanced controls that were in the previous version. This watered down thing has crushed a decade of workflow and material creation for me, or at least made it pretty hard. I've found myself editing materials in notepad at times.

Could you be more specific which options you miss in your workflow?
During the redesign process of the UI there was no intention to "water down" the functionality of V-Ray. On the contrary, v3 offers a lot more than v2.
Some of the missing options from v2.0 were cut simply due to lack of support in the V-Ray 3 core, while others were either replaced by other plugins or only needed for workflows no longer deemed productive or offering sufficient quality.

Kind regards,
Peter