faceted geometry

[spearl]

I am playing around with VRay for SU to see if we should get it for my office. In my initial test renderings the sphere I have in my scene is rendering faceted (unsmooth). I went in and re-smoothed the edges in SketchUp and tried again and I got the same result. Is there something I am missing to make curved geometry render smooth? Can anyone help me out? Thanks.

[40th]

Re: faceted geometry

Even though you see the sphere smooth in SU the number of faces/polygons remains the same as before the SU edge smooth.
What you can do is to use sub and smooth plugin, or remake the sphere and this time with more sides.

[thomthom]

Re: faceted geometry

I think this is a bug that happens some times. I believe one workaround is to explode and regroup.

[dalomar_cg]

Re: faceted geometry

Yes it is a bug. This is listed in the know issues in the ReadMe file.

[spearl]

Re: faceted geometry

Yes it is a bug. This is listed in the know issues in the ReadMe file.

When will another update be released? I am evaluating VRay for my office and this is a bug that would be important to have fixed before we consider purchasing.

I also get the same faceting effect with shadows on spheres. Where the surface curves and starts to gradient into shadow you see a faceted shadow along that line from light to dark. Is this also a know bug?

[dalomar_cg]

Re: faceted geometry

We are currently in the process of developing a new full version of VfSU. The time table for this new development is much longer than that of a service release (which is for smaller features and minor bug fixes), so there will not be a new version for quite a while. We don't have a specific date at the moment, but we'll be posting more info as the development process progresses.

The faceted shadow actually isn't a bug, just a side effect of a coarse mesh. The smooth surface is actually just a trick. In reality, the object is still flat, but we're smoothing the object based on the other faces that are in close proximity. With shadows, you can only use the actual mesh to calculate those, so that's why you'll see that.

[Jackson_cg]

Re: faceted geometry

Funnily enough I have only ever seen this bug in one single group (a tap/faucet) in any of the thousands of groups in hundreds of models I've worked in. In other words, it should have an extremely minimal effect on your workflow, I wouldn't let it put you off VfSU.

[dalomar_cg]

Re: faceted geometry

And even at that, typically an explode and a regroup smooths it back out again.

[thomthom]

Re: faceted geometry

And even at that, typically an explode and a regroup smooths it back out again.

Is there a workaround that doesn't involve exploding. I'm using a plugin Profile Builder that lofts profiles along lines/curves. What's so good about that plugin is that I can edit the profile or curve at any point. But only as long as I don't explode the group it greates. The problem is that V-Ray doesn't seem to recognize the smoothing applied to the geometry created by this plugin. However, when I test with some Ruby script to see if SU reports back correctly that the edges are softened and smoothed everything appears normal.
So I don't know why V-Ray doesn't recognize this, and I don't know how to correct this without exploding the group.

[dalomar_cg]

Re: faceted geometry

I think it has to do with SU not really registering the normal information in the same way we're looking for it. It shouldn't be too big of a deal, but it did involve adjusting our exporting process and we weren't willing to do that with an SR...too much risk.