New V-Ray (1.48.66) won't render

[dkendig]

Re: New V-Ray (1.48.66) won't render

IWASACLOUD - If your issues match the original poster's issues, then you don't need to open a separate thread for that, but the other issues you say you have, should be in a different thread since they're not related.

SHINKAKASHI- The error message talking about the TEMP folder being full, isn't one of our error messages, that's why nobody's gotten an answer about that error in this forum. I don't doubt that it's being caused by something our plugin does, but it's not an error that we generate ourselves. We also have been unable to reproduce the error on any of our machines.

We have had some reports about displacement and transparency causing some issues. Displacement does't render in a material preview (the preview ends up just black). Displacement also has some new parameters in this version, now you can control displacement on a per material basis. I don't know if any of your materials use displacement, but if they do, you may want to increase the edge length of the displacement. Transparency has been slowing down renders in some cases. Specifically with any scenes that have very intricate transparency maps (that's really all I've tested so far) such as vegetation. If you take out the transparency maps for the vegetation materials, does that change anything?

Oh wow, here's a question, what resolution are you trying to render out? I can't believe I missed this one ::smacks forehead::. Does the scene render if you just lower the output to something tiny like 320x240?

TOURNIQUETMASTER - When you regenerate all of the V-Ray materials, we just delete anything material related on the V-Ray side, and then treat the SketchUp scene like it would be handled if it had no V-Ray data, so all you end up with is some V-Ray materials the correspond with a SketchUp material, but the only layer in the material is a diffuse layer. If you save all of your materials prior to running that tool, and then import all of the materials back in after running the tool, you should be fine. I guess that old scene had something messed up in it. I'm glad we were able to salvage it. By the way, did the Force Sync for all Materials tool not work? If there's a material problem, generally the sync tool should fix it.

[shinkakashi]

Re: New V-Ray (1.48.66) won't render

dkendig, I think I've found the issue. I've tried lowering the rendering resolution, but without success. My scene doesn't have displacement. So, following your lead about the transpareny issues, I connected the dots and found the problem. I'm using a tree which have transparency maps for it's foliages. I've deleted the trees, and the render went fine. I don't know if it's a problem with the maps or the objetcs, but I will try to isolate the problem.

Nevertheless, the issue about the huge parsing time is still present. I though you guys were going to decrease the parsing time, not increase it. Because that's what happening at my scene. At the previous version, the parsing time for this specific scene was about 3 to 4 minutes. Now, it's about 5 ou 6. I'm quite disapointed at that.

[dkendig]

Re: New V-Ray (1.48.66) won't render

SHINKAKASHI- YAY IT RENDERS! ::high fives:: Who says working from home all hours of the night means you're crazy? ::twitches:: I'm really glad you were able to get it to do something at least. I wish I knew why transparency was killing render times so bad, and how not a single one of our beta testers missed it...

The parsing time should be down in this version, but not necessarily for all scenes. It shouldn't take LONGER though... that's bizzare. Are you counting the time prior to the VFB popping up, or are you talking about between pressing render and actually seeing something in the VFB? The scene parsing happens prior to the VFB popping up. Now the important thing to know about the parsing time, is that in the old version, if you had materials applied to components or groups, you might as well go read a novel after hitting the render button, because it would take forever. In the latest version this issue is not a problem, and in fact I believe it speeds up parsing time if you use components and groups as you'd normally expect to be able to use them. You'd have to ask Fernando or one of our beta testers for confirmation though. I know one scene that Fernando had took something like 15 minutes to preprocess in our old product, and less than a minute in the new version... and Thomthom had a scene with a bunch of toruses that went pretty quick too.

[shinkakashi]

Re: New V-Ray (1.48.66) won't render

You're talking about that entire story regarding the Remove C-G plugin, right? Well, in my case, the plugin was helpfull when I use third-party components, in which I don't know how was the texturing process that the creator adopted. When I'm texturing stuff, I always paint the face of the geometry inside the group/component (you can see that you're painting the face when you can actually "touch" it, showing the little blue dots along the selected face), instead of painting the group/component, as some people does. The plugin really kills some parsing time, in the case that I use a lot of third-party components. In some occasions, I've been able to get about 200 materials deleted with the plugin

About the question that you asked me regarding the VFB pop up, when I've meant "parsing time", I'm talking from the moment when we click the render button until the VFB shows up at the screen. Another thing that would require your attention is that even after the VFB appears, it does take a large amount of time until the first pass (or pre-pass, light cache, whatever) shows up, specially on larger scenes.. that is also strange.

About the render, it went well. One thing to notice, it's that the tree renders normally in a new scene alone (works using both actual B&W transparency JPEG map as the new "use color for transparency"). But in the scene, it just doesn't render. I think the new version is lacking some retroactivity regarding the scenes saved in the previous version. Is there any chances that ASGvis will launch a fix to those little things?

[dkendig]

Re: New V-Ray (1.48.66) won't render

You're talking about that entire story regarding the Remove C-G plugin, right?

Right, try benchmarking your scenes with and without using that tool. Not using the tool should speed up parsing time I believe. I could be wrong, but I'm right about this.

About the render, it went well. One thing to notice, it's that the tree renders normally in a new scene alone (works using both actual B&W transparency JPEG map as the new "use color for transparency"). But in the scene, it just doesn't render.

Odd... and you said that this is still the case even after using the Force Sync for All Materials tool in the debug menu? Where did this tree come from? Is it on 3D Warehouse? Would it be possible to send us the offending tree so we can figure out what makes it so special? btw, "use color for transparency" will make your diffuse layer ignore anything you have set for a transparency texture. Instead it will use the alpha of the image that is being used for the diffuse color texture. Just wanted to be clear everyone knew what that option does.

Is there any chances that ASGvis will launch a fix to those little things?

Well of course. We just need to figure out what slipped past the beta process and patch it up. So the more detail we can get about everyone's issues, the better. Video demonstrating issues makes it so incredibly easy to communicate about this stuff, so that's something to keep in mind for the future. There are programs out there like Jing that let you record your screen and then upload the video somewhere to share with others.

[TqM]

Re: New V-Ray (1.48.66) won't render

@DKENDIG - No unfortunately in this case the force sync did not fix the issue. Thank you for explaining the regenerate. I re-imported the materials to their correct assignments and it is fine.

[shinkakashi]

Re: New V-Ray (1.48.66) won't render

Odd... and you said that this is still the case even after using the Force Sync for All Materials tool in the debug menu? Where did this tree come from? Is it on 3D Warehouse? Would it be possible to send us the offending tree so we can figure out what makes it so special? btw, "use color for transparency" will make your diffuse layer ignore anything you have set for a transparency texture. Instead it will use the alpha of the image that is being used for the diffuse color texture. Just wanted to be clear everyone knew what that option does.

Yes, even pressing the "Force sync" option, still no sign of render.

Maybe you can try downloading the tree yourself and trying to render in a large scene with at least 15 - 20 of those, and tell to us if you could render or not. It's available through this link:

http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehou...7c&prevstart=0

[dkendig]

Re: New V-Ray (1.48.66) won't render

I just downloaded the model and started trying to render it. I'm just doing one tree for now. It appears to render VERY slowly once I enable transparency. Just to simplify things a bit, I went in to the GI render options and set it to only use DMC for the first pass, and then nothing for the second pass. Now the tree seems to render fine. Then I set the GI options back to defaults so I was using Irradiance Map and DMC again. I went in to the Irradiance Map options and I set the Min Rate to -4 and the Max Rate to -2. Now I can see it start to render the tree a lot sooner, but it still takes a long time to render. Still don't know what to say about this issue really. All I can say safely is that the tree model you linked me to can in fact render in our plugin without needing to do anything special, it just takes forever. There might be a setting that needs to be changed somewhere, but that's not really my area of expertise. This still needs to be tracked down further. Hopefully someone can get to the bottom of this by next week.

[shinkakashi]

Re: New V-Ray (1.48.66) won't render

Devin, I also noticed that the tree renders very slowly with the default visopt which came along with 1.48.66.. maybe something regarding the DMC or another setting at the options.

But when I change to my personal exterior visopt (Primary: IR - Secondary: LC) it renders much more faster. The only thing now that needs to be fixed or discovered is that question regarding the use of many of those trees in a large scene.

[fpedrogo]

Re: New V-Ray (1.48.66) won't render

The DMC is a more precise method that Light Cache and take more time to calculate than Light CXache as well. So, the DMC always going to take more time than Light Cache. The main issue here is the transparency rays trace and the option that controls that is on Global Switches, "Max Transparency level and Cut off" If you reduce those value, for example, the cutoff to .5 and the Max Transparency level to 10, the render is a lot faster. But the default value sould be ok and faster. In the build 1.05.30 with exactly the save value of our new default value (1.48.66) the render is faster. So I don't think that the default value is the issue here, or the DMC, Light Cache. We have to find some weird thing that is causing this issue.

The problem by turning down the Max Transparency Level and the cutoff id that you could limit the transparency for glass, and that is not good to have a very nice and realistic glass stuff.

Best

[thomthom]

Re: New V-Ray (1.48.66) won't render

I just used that tree in a render - using IR+LC. Did not notice any slowdowns with it.

[edonk]

Re: New V-Ray (1.48.66) won't render

I dont know if this is useful information or not, but I had a scene a few months back with version 1.05 that had 20-30 of those exact trees in and it would never render at all, it would just crash with memory issues. In the end I created different camera scenes with just the trees in that scene visible to the camera and all others frozen off. My point being that even with 3 or 4, these trees take an absolute age to render, and I have a pretty high spec machine. I was willing to take the time sacrifice because they seem to look so good.
I havent had chance to try that scene in 1.48 but I'm guessing it would still have the same issues as what you are describing Dkendig. Those trees are a sketchup killer, I dont think its a Vray issue.

[MartinPh]

Re: New V-Ray (1.48.66) won't render

I don't know. I'm struggling with a model that rendered without trouble in 'old' Vray but won't render in Vray 1.48.66 - now Vray and SU simply shut down altogether. The problems I have seem very similar to those described by Shinkakashi. But a scene with five of these trees (very nice ones I should say) rendered just fine.