for v-ray to be a true mass succes

[40th]

Re: for v-ray to be a true mass succes

I don't know how long are the parsing times with vfr, but since the topic here is "FOR V-RAY TO BE A TRUE MASS SUCCES"
The true success would be not having to wait for parsing (of Vray fSU) !

[dkendig]

Re: for v-ray to be a true mass succes

40th: Agreed, we are doing our best to keep the parsing times down. So far it's looking pretty decent.

Micha: Thank you, I know you can't wait to get your hands on the current WIP build. I can't wait to start working on VfR! It's so much easier to work with than Sketchup's insane SDK. I really hope the port from the latest VfS goes as smoothly as we think it might.

[merlik585]

Re: for v-ray to be a true mass succes

Thank You for your answer,now all I have to do is to be "ZEN" enough,and master the art of patience until VFR ,is available .

[ALTO]

Re: for v-ray to be a true mass succes

Thanks for the info dkendig.

Does the "revamped" UI already support drag&drop for textures/colors and it's possible to drag bitmaps directly from explorer?

Could you please tell us something about your plan on releasing new versions?
I mean, could we expect some free upgrades with the new code or are you thinking to release only a Major Version?
Any chance to know an estimated time for the whole process? Another year?

(I'm absolutely not complaining at all, but we are deciding if it's the case to switch from Rhino+VfR to other applications (for various reasons), actually an imminent new VfR version could change our minds...)

Thanks

[dkendig]

Re: for v-ray to be a true mass succes

Does the "revamped" UI already support drag&drop for textures/colors and it's possible to drag bitmaps directly from explorer?

No not yet, we are trying to get the product to a stable point. We did, and still do want to add drag and drop for textures and colors. Our new build allows us to add drag and drop much more quickly than our old product did, but we have not had the opportunity to add that feature yet.

Could you please tell us something about your plan on releasing new versions?

Unfortunately, I'm a developer, so I don't know much about the sales side of things. In the past, we have provided free upgrades, but these were all minor releases. I'm not sure what the plan is for this next release, or following releases.

Any chance to know an estimated time for the whole process? Another year?

If you're asking about the latest VfS version that is under development right now, I would say it should be available for presale by the end of the year most likely. It all depends on how we feel about the product once our testers get their hands on our latest build, and are able to test it thoroughly. We want to be sure that this next release is as stable and bug free as we can make it.

If you're asking about VfR, we have not tried porting our core plugin over to Rhino yet, so we can't be sure on a time frame. In theory though, porting the plugin to another application should be fairly painless, when compared to how we had to go about things in the past. But really we won't know for sure until we actually port our plugin over, and then send it out to our testers. We really want both VfR and VfS to be done ASAP though. We feel that this new core will allow us to really open up the development doors to a lot of exciting things.

In case you're wondering why we decided to tackle VfS first, the answer is simple. VfS is bit crippled when compared to VfR. Parsing times take too long, there are some features that are missing, and SketchUp is cross platform compatible. We really wanted to try our hand at getting our product on other operating systems (I'm looking forward to having our DR Spawner on Linux one of these days, not yet though).

Thank You for your answer,now all I have to do is to be "ZEN" enough,and master the art of patience until VFR ,is available .

Hang in there ;D We appreciate everyone's patience. I know it's like waiting to open a birthday present. We're getting closer every day!

[Micha_cg]

Re: for v-ray to be a true mass succes

We really wanted to try our hand at getting our product on other operating systems (I'm looking forward to having our DR Spawner on Linux one of these days, not yet though).

Sounds great. A ready-to-install live CD or something like this could be great. I don't know so much about Linux, but some distributations can be quite small.
I don't it will be possible, but a dream from me is a complete install on an USB stick and all temporary storage of scene/textures are done per RAM disk. So, no hard disk would be needed, only a big RAM. Could be quite fast.
But I know, that is something for the far future.

[crossmo]

Re: for v-ray to be a true mass succes

I'm really excited what happens at the end of the year. State of the Art in Usability is in my opinion the Maxwell-Plugin for Rhino and for ease of Use it's Hypershot. This threat started nearly 3years ago, and still this bulky grey interface annoyes me. To be honest, when I have to leave my Mac for 3d stuff at work I feel like bumped right into the middleage of softwaredevelpoment everytime I have to work with Vray. Unbelievable that such a usability impertinece still exists in 2010. No wonder that the design offices around me switched to other software packages.
I'm just a user (product-viz) and not a nerd. I need a good picture quality, no hyper-photorealism (it's a nice plus if it is) in an affordable time. It's a pitty that Hypershot got trouble with their license stuff, otherwise I would buy it. Have you seen the interactive focus point? Have you seen how fast it is? I think if VfR want's to survive it has to be competitive with current renderengines on the market. But I guess that the Vray team is too engineered driven and usability is not that important. If the next version will not come soon, I'm gone. Sorry Vray. I have to work and not the time and money to collect Zen and wait until you're maybe ready at the end of the year. That didn't sound very convincing to me.
Cheers.

[dkendig]

Re: for v-ray to be a true mass succes

Our UI is a sort of copy/paste job from what the Chaos Group (the guys that make V-Ray) UI looked like in 3D Studio Max (which has an absolutely horrible UI layout in my opinion). Since then... we haven't really had time to fix up our UI so it has a more pleasing look and feel. We put out a plugin that was a bit rough, but did the job. Then we put out a service release that fixed some horrific issues with the 1.0 release... and now after we've gotten our feet wet, and see what is involved with getting this product to do what we want it to do, we've rewritten our plugin so it has more bells, whistles, and the ability to add more easily, AND... the UI will be able to be updated without pulling teeth and selling first born children.

So in other words, we agree with you crossmo, the existing product will not do... so that's why we completely rewrote the whole thing (even though it may look the same on the outside). If you can wait it out, cool. If you can't, sorry to hear it. If you want V-Ray to be like product X... talk to Chaos Group because it has nothing to do with ASGvis.

As far as the product not being released any time soon... we're not developing the V-Ray for Rhino plugin yet, that's what comes right after we finish with SketchUp. The SketchUp plugin should be released next Wednesday. We think the update will be entirely worth everyone's time and patience, once we get it to where we really want to take it. We hope everyone will join us in rejoice when it's released.

[ALTO]

Re: for v-ray to be a true mass succes

I've just tried the new SU demo version, please do something with that GUI as soon as you can... it looks horrible...

:

[dkendig]

Re: for v-ray to be a true mass succes

Yeah it does, our goal was to make this latest version mimic our old horrible UI. If you do a simple forum search, you'll find lots of posts explaining why this is, our goals, etc. It's not worth explaining over and over if nobody is going to read any of it.

[ALTO]

Re: for v-ray to be a true mass succes

The problem is that the current UI is worst than the old one, dimensions are HUGE and it took me 1 minute to find how to load a map ...

I can understand your goal and your hurry : but please put things in casual order is not acceptable from my pov, look at the ColorMapping rollout:



How could someone with low knowledge understand something?


See how it looks in other applications:

It's not worth explaining over and over if nobody is going to read any of it.

Everyone must do the work he is capable of doing...

[Micha_cg]

Re: for v-ray to be a true mass succes

Correct colors/textures at the color mapping now? And not placed side by side? It looks like the new plugin isn't like the old one. I afraid a lot of confusion. The UI isn't new, isn't well arranged, but also dosn't keep the old structure.

Why are the numbers so long? A gamma value of 2.201024 wouldn't be never useful.

First the options and than the type chooser? Most people are reading from top to down. Dark multiplier and bright multiplier are placed at different places.

I don't understand why options must be placed so chaotic. Looks like someone arranged the interface who never worked with Vray. The options are not independent parameters and should be logical arranged.

:-\

[dkendig]

Re: for v-ray to be a true mass succes

Everyone must do the work he is capable of doing...

My apologies, it's been a crazy time lately with all of the stuff with the latest release. I guess I got a little frustrated.

I don't understand why options must be placed so chaotic. Looks like someone arranged the interface who never worked with Vray. The options are not independent parameters and should be logical arranged.

The UI was actually automatically generated in many cases. Due to time constraints, we were unable to arrange all of the UI by hand. We made sure that the labels for controls were correct, but honestly we didn't have time to worry about the UI too much for this release. We rewrote the whole thing from scratch. We tried to stick to the old UI as much as possible, to avoid too much confusion, but the order of some controls have been moved due to the automatic UI arrangement. We realize the that automatic arrangement isn't optimal, but it shouldn't be too different. I looked at the screen shots that were posted, all of the same controls are there, so the functionality was preserved, but I understand if the workflow change throws anyone off. We are planning on changing the UI in an upcoming release or patch, but for now our UI is what it is.

[Micha_cg]

Re: for v-ray to be a true mass succes

Hmm, I think, it was no good idea to release with an "automatic" arranged UI. The plugin was know as one with a very basic UI (for me it was ok ) and now it's more worse than before. If I understand right, than the new release isn't a beta or alpha version. A little bit arrangement (based on the old version) had cost a half day of work ...

The question should be, what should the minimum of quality and will this minimum of quality good enough for the long-dated business. The screenshots here let me lose my anticipation for the new release. I miss the feeling that the developer love her work, love to write a Vray plugin. Maybe I'm to much belive that products should be like an Apple product or the Maxwell plugin or MoI3D. Don't forget, many user studied design or architecture and like to use perfect things. It's bitter to see the screenshots of the long expected new release.

Sorry for my harsh words, but I hope VfR will be more polished in the future and will be looking like a premium product. My best wishes for the next steps of development.

[dkendig]

Re: for v-ray to be a true mass succes

Yeah Micha, we didn't polish the UI yet. The new rewrite of our plugin allows us to modify our UI easier than the old plugin did. We plan on fixing any problem areas that anyone mentions. Just to be clear, not all of the UI is autogenerated, but there are some panels here and there that weren't able to be arranged to match the old product 100% yet.