Some UI wish

[ALTO]

Here are some of my thoughts/wish about new interface on next major update:

Regarding General UI, you should have a look at SolidRocks plugin for 3dStudioMax: LINK
An absolutely nice plugin, it offers a lot of presets (interior and exterior too) with the possibility to customize all options.
This is for sure useful for "newbie" but also for experencied users.
It allow also some kind of optimization for calculate lightcache in DR...

I think in the Physical Camera rollout there should be a drop down menu with Camera name (NamedView name)

Also please REMOVE the Rhino standard light as Sun when using Sky in GI, this only confuse new users and it's not useful for others.
I saw too many times the question "Why i have 2 shadows when i use PhysicalSky?" ...
(and if Default lights (in GlobalSwitch rollout) is unchecked the Default Rhino light must be not visible)
Instead i think when we choose sky in Environment and Background the Plugin should popup a window wich ask "Would you like to add a Sun?"; affermative answer is linked to the _Sunlight command, negative answer allow us to use Sky without Sun.

Of course we need all missed features like enable/disable Displacement, ForceBackFaceCulling, Override Mtl (not only color), more AA filter, working RenderElements...

________________


About the Material Editor i would really like to have a Weight Map and a Matte Layer like in VfC4D LINK

Also i've recently finished a work with various kind of wood, all with the same finish but with different texture, if it's possible it would be nice if we could edit more than one Material at once, i mean select two or more Material from the "SceneBrowser" and change for example the Refl value to all of them with one click.

I hope to see also Ward BRDF in next update, a better way to use Fresnel refl (simple checkbox like in VfMax would be nice) and the Interpolation option for reflection and refraction.

And of course as already mentioned in the past we need a better material/scene browser and a better way to manage material layers.


I think it's all for the moment,

Thanks for your support

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Some UI wish

I took a look at the SolidRocks video and it looks quite good. Many of the things we are looking to do with our interface changes are represented in some form or another within that demo although ours will be a little bit more segregated. The idea is to have a beginner intermediate and advanced, so there are aspects of that solidrocks plugin that might be in the beginner and might be in intermediate. I do like the interior/exterior little preset thing they had going on. It also looked like it adjusted for resolution as well, which is something that I'd like to automate.

There are some aspects of that plugin that I have some questions about...specifically the auto exposure and white balance functionality. Right now I think that the auto exposure is done through simply reading a rendered image and determining the desired brightness settings. Yes, this is a step in the right direction, but this is very similar to the auto exposure process that is done within the camera. Photographers know that this is not 100% reliable as this leads to exposure that's based off of what you see as opposed to the amount of light that's actually in the scene. I'd like to implement autoexposure, but would rather it be something more akin to a light meter than normal camera auto exposure. The white balance thing I'm just wondering if you can click on an area of the image to set that or does it do it automatically.

Hopefully with the next version we don't ask people to think for themselves nearly as much. If we can take the extra step to do 1 or 2 things automatically it will help make V-Ray be easier to work with. Auto setting the sun with the sky is a good one, and there are a few other places that I'd like to see that kind of thinking.

We should be adding support for almost all of the V-Ray plugins that are available to us, so that should fill in a number of gaps there. AA filters are maxed out though, as the other ones that VfMax has are native to Max.

The Matte map looks like its the V-Ray MtlWrapper, so that will be in there. Can you explain a bit more about the Weight Material? I'm not 100% sure what it does from the description

There will be a way within the next version to instance material layers, so for your wood example I could make a reflection layer that would be used for all of those wood materials, have a separate wood material for each texture and have those materials each use that reflection layer. This should be able to be done for any layer used or created within a layer material.

Not sure where Ward stands...I'll try and see if its in the VRay SDK. Fresnel will be better than it is now (easier manipulation of min/max reflection values and linking of IOR between reflection and refraction layers). Interpolation I really don't know about and off the top of my head I don't think it looks good. I would like it in there as well, but right now it looks like there will be bigger fish to fry for the next version.

[ALTO]

Re: Some UI wish

Hi Damien,
since i don't use SolidRock i don't know how auto-exposure and white balance works, but from the their forum:

- nEw Auto WhiteBalance tool : just focus on a "white" part of your scene, and press button !

Always from this plugin, the optimized LightCache calculation for DE, looks interesting: LINK


AA filter i really miss the Mitchell-Netravali, so no chance to have it?

Material Weight in VfC4D is a transparent/clip properties that "override" other layers transparency, basically you don't need to load the same alpha map in diffuse, reflection etc.., just use one map in Weight layer and automatically you get a perfect clipmap...

Another wish i have is related to vray lights, it would be nice if we could have a "dynamic" properties panel for lights, i mean something like in brazil when you can change/replace the type of light from a simple dropdown menu. (without delete and re-create light objects)


Regarding other things all looks very promising.

Thanks for your infos.

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Some UI wish

That "shared LC" link is not that interesting at all really. It just renders it locally (LC with DR is not shared, but each spawner calculates its own LC solution), saves it and sends it to the spawners. All it does is prevent slow spawners from taking too long with the LC and not contributing. If you want a script that does that I can write that for you in a few minutes.

There's a chance if the Mitchel Netravali filter is rewritten. I'm not sure if the algorithm is published anywhere or not. If it is and its public domain than possibly. If not I'd use Catmull Rom

The Weight thing sound good...we could probably have a "per material" alpha map instead of a per layer one...that would negate a whole other material type.

This is how the lights are in VfMax...you can change them via drop down box. I think there's a better chance of that if we start getting into custom drawn objects or if we add our own object type. Although I see the benefit in being able to change light types like that, I'm not 100% sure that it will make the cut.

[Micha_cg]

Re: Some UI wish

That "shared LC" link is not that interesting at all really. It just renders it locally (LC with DR is not shared, but each spawner calculates its own LC solution), saves it and sends it to the spawners. All it does is prevent slow spawners from taking too long with the LC and not contributing. If you want a script that does that I can write that for you in a few minutes.

That I don't understand - " ... each spawner calculates its own LC solution ... All it does is prevent slow spawners from taking too long with the LC and not contributing". If all slaves wouldn't calculate the LC and the master msut not wait for the slaves, than this would be logical for me - and if I understand right, this does SolidRock. Or doe's the master ignore the slaves and would start the IM calculation befor a slow slave is ready with his LC calcualtion?
Better would be, the user could enable, that each spawner calculate an own LC and all LC are used. At my network all machines have the same power and it's a waste of time/power during the LC pass.

Speed up GI usage - it could be nice, if a rendering is finish, the user could start a rerendering or renderwindow based on the GI caches without to fiddle about the GI cache paths (the interface is much to large, IM and LC cache can be set without scrolling). Maybe new commands could be helpfull ... viscacherender and viscacherenderwindow.

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Some UI wish

When LC is used with DR each individual slave calculates its own LC solution. The calculations are not shared between all the slaves, instead you'll just get copies of the same LC solution. So basically there's no advantage to using LC with DR because the amount of time taken to calculate it is the same as if there was no DR at all.

What it appears that this solid rocks think is doing is not to allow the LC solution to be shared (that's something that Vlado has to work out) but provide a work around for time differences in the calculation of each node. Here's an example. If I'm working on a dual quad core machine and all my spawners are just quad cores, then my local machine will calculate the LC solution faster than my spawners. Once my machine is done the LC calculation it doesn't need to wait for anything else, so it goes on calculating IR or the actual image. However, the spawners are still calculating the LC solution (that we already have) and are unable to help calculate the IR map (something they can actually help with). So what this solid rocks thing does is just calculates the LC solution locally (since that's all that matters anyway), saves it, sets the mode to From File, loads the saved solution, enables DR, and continues on with the rest of the render.

It is important that you understand that this DOES NOT change the ability for LC calculations to be shared across spawners, just prevents them from calculating it at all.

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Some UI wish

Speed up GI usage - it could be nice, if a rendering is finish, the user could start a rerendering or renderwindow based on the GI caches without to fiddle about the GI cache paths (the interface is much to large, IM and LC cache can be set without scrolling). Maybe new commands could be helpfull ... viscacherender and viscacherenderwindow.

I get you, but I don't understand why exactly you want this. With LC, EVERYTHING has to be the same in order for the LC solution has to be valid...camera position, lighting, geometry, materials. With IR you can move the camera position, but that's about it. So in order to really take advantage of those cached solutions they would have to be doing the exact same render again without any changes. At best you could switch IR over to Incremental Add so you could at least move the camera around...and to do that its one click. Am I not getting something here?

[Micha_cg]

Re: Some UI wish

It would be good, if a small material error is shown at the rendering, a texture isn't right, a material color looks bad, a reflection intensity not right. Most it is needed for final high res renderings, because at the smaller preview before some error was not visible.
Other case, an object should be rendered with different textures/materials. Some time the GI color isn't so important to be 100% correct.
At the moment I must open the options, scroll, save, search file, scroll, save, search file, render, disable the cache for an other rendering ...

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Some UI wish

Why don't you try using the visSceneIR command that's in V-Ray utilities. If you save the view, then it should do what you're asking for.

[ALTO]

Re: Some UI wish

When LC is used with DR each individual slave calculates its own LC solution. The calculations are not shared between all the slaves, instead you'll just get copies of the same LC solution. So basically there's no advantage to using LC with DR because the amount of time taken to calculate it is the same as if there was no DR at all.

What it appears that this solid rocks think is doing is not to allow the LC solution to be shared (that's something that Vlado has to work out) but provide a work around for time differences in the calculation of each node. Here's an example. If I'm working on a dual quad core machine and all my spawners are just quad cores, then my local machine will calculate the LC solution faster than my spawners. Once my machine is done the LC calculation it doesn't need to wait for anything else, so it goes on calculating IR or the actual image. However, the spawners are still calculating the LC solution (that we already have) and are unable to help calculate the IR map (something they can actually help with). So what this solid rocks thing does is just calculates the LC solution locally (since that's all that matters anyway), saves it, sets the mode to From File, loads the saved solution, enables DR, and continues on with the rest of the render.

It is important that you understand that this DOES NOT change the ability for LC calculations to be shared across spawners, just prevents them from calculating it at all.

Thanks for the explanation, so optimized LC in DR is something that only Vlado could real improve (if possible).

I don't know how hard is to rewrite the Mitchell-Netravali filter, anyway this is the paper: 'Reconstruction Filters in Computer Graphics' by Mitchell and Netravali, 1988.

Sorry, maybe it's my english but i've not understand if Vray light panel will be improved... :-[

[Micha_cg]

Re: Some UI wish

Thanks for the explanation, so optimized LC in DR is something that only Vlado could real improve (if possible).

http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbu...025#post394025