Re: Need a little Help: Why are these renderings so blotchy?
Getting the geometry from SU is the issue...once we have the geometry its all the same. The caustics issue is with the V-Ray Sun. In order to get caustics from the sun you have to have an explicit location as opposed to just a vector. Since we don't have that causes the caustics situation to be a little shakey. On the rest of the lights caustics are fine.
Over all V-Ray's implementation in Max is much "tighter" because 1) it was there first, 2)Max is setup to have robust plugins running inside of it (SU doesn't offer much beyond Ruby scripting), and 3) Max was built for rendering...SU was never designed to have a renderer. I'll just leave it at that.
The interface would allow you to switch back and forth between different modes, so you wouldn't be locked in to one UI or another. Also, the settings themselves would be structured in a way that would try and be as smart, yet universal as possible. In other words, the settings would be ones that work well for achieving a given quality level with most scenes within a fairly respectable time frame.
I understand where your coming from with more documentation and tutorials, but there are a few issues with that. The first one being that if the interface is confusing and overwhelming, all the documentation you do will be fighting this. 90% of what's visible right now is of use to most of you, so why bombard you all with tons of settings that you'll never need to know about. The second thing is that people don't read documentation. I know you're sitting back and saying "Well I'd read it", and I'm 100% sure that you would, but I point a lot of people to resources that are already available and its clear that they've never taken a look at it or tried to find it. People don't read documentation for a number of reasons...
A) The "It should just easy to use...I shouldn't need documentation" argument. A rethinking of our UI will help that...documentation won't.
B) "I'm just too busy". An interface as cumbersome as ours isn't conducive to working quickly when you don't know what's going on. So if you don't have the time to learn, you'll also be loosing time trying to tread through the interface. Making the interface quicker to use and quicker to pick up helps people who won't have the time to read documentation either way.
C) "There's too much to read". When you expose every single setting, then documentation/tutorials will have to address, in some form or another, all the settings that are required in getting from point A to point B. A simpler interface can make documentation easier as well. Besides, I don't really consider tutorials that say "change these settings from this to this and press render" very successful.
D) Creating good documentation is fair more resource intensive then changing our ui (which is why its kinda frustrating that we haven't changed it yet, but that's another story). Creating documentation, writing tutorials, or writing a manual is very intense stuff. You've got to have someone who knows what's going on enough to explain the topic (simple for "what's a texture map", hard for "What's the Adaptive Amount do and why is .85 a good number"). Not only that, they've got to explain it clear enough so that people who do not have a whole lot of technical knowledge will understand it. There's also scenes to make, proof reading, images to render...
Getting the geometry from SU is the issue...once we have the geometry its all the same. The caustics issue is with the V-Ray Sun. In order to get caustics from the sun you have to have an explicit location as opposed to just a vector. Since we don't have that causes the caustics situation to be a little shakey. On the rest of the lights caustics are fine.
Over all V-Ray's implementation in Max is much "tighter" because 1) it was there first, 2)Max is setup to have robust plugins running inside of it (SU doesn't offer much beyond Ruby scripting), and 3) Max was built for rendering...SU was never designed to have a renderer. I'll just leave it at that.
The interface would allow you to switch back and forth between different modes, so you wouldn't be locked in to one UI or another. Also, the settings themselves would be structured in a way that would try and be as smart, yet universal as possible. In other words, the settings would be ones that work well for achieving a given quality level with most scenes within a fairly respectable time frame.
I understand where your coming from with more documentation and tutorials, but there are a few issues with that. The first one being that if the interface is confusing and overwhelming, all the documentation you do will be fighting this. 90% of what's visible right now is of use to most of you, so why bombard you all with tons of settings that you'll never need to know about. The second thing is that people don't read documentation. I know you're sitting back and saying "Well I'd read it", and I'm 100% sure that you would, but I point a lot of people to resources that are already available and its clear that they've never taken a look at it or tried to find it. People don't read documentation for a number of reasons...
A) The "It should just easy to use...I shouldn't need documentation" argument. A rethinking of our UI will help that...documentation won't.
B) "I'm just too busy". An interface as cumbersome as ours isn't conducive to working quickly when you don't know what's going on. So if you don't have the time to learn, you'll also be loosing time trying to tread through the interface. Making the interface quicker to use and quicker to pick up helps people who won't have the time to read documentation either way.
C) "There's too much to read". When you expose every single setting, then documentation/tutorials will have to address, in some form or another, all the settings that are required in getting from point A to point B. A simpler interface can make documentation easier as well. Besides, I don't really consider tutorials that say "change these settings from this to this and press render" very successful.
D) Creating good documentation is fair more resource intensive then changing our ui (which is why its kinda frustrating that we haven't changed it yet, but that's another story). Creating documentation, writing tutorials, or writing a manual is very intense stuff. You've got to have someone who knows what's going on enough to explain the topic (simple for "what's a texture map", hard for "What's the Adaptive Amount do and why is .85 a good number"). Not only that, they've got to explain it clear enough so that people who do not have a whole lot of technical knowledge will understand it. There's also scenes to make, proof reading, images to render...
Comment