foliage workflow

[wilsimar]

Hi.. I'm trying vray for unreal and I can't use dense grass foliage.
can someone show me correct workflow to use vegetation instances with unreal and vray?
when I try paint foliage system with 1 grass patch of ~3.100 tris over little house garden (32k patchs) and try to render vray(cpu render) it is freezing my computer (i7 6700 + 32gb ddr). I think is vray using copy and dont instances of grass foliage because ram use is very very high.
Unreal can manage the same on viewport.
vray next trial for 3dsmax can manage 100x this amount for same grass patch using forestpack.
if I reduce grass patch tris number to 20% I can to render, but very slow to start the render.

I hope you will can understand me.
thank you

[Alexander.Atanasov]

Hi, wilsimar

Thank you for pointing that there is a problem with the foliage system. We have done some test and found a bug which we are now trying to fix and hopefully will be ready for the next release. Are you using a static mesh for the grass of a vrmesh (V-Ray proxy). As a suggestion I recommend you try to convert the grass patch to vrmesh, import it in Unreal and replace the Mesh file in the Foliage tool with the imported proxy file. Please tell us how it goes.

Best regards,
Alexander

[wilsimar]

Yes I was using static mesh, but now I can to render 260k full patchs easy and quick using vrmesh... but unreal viewport is slowdowning, I need to use foliage distance culling for speedup viewport... vrmesh preview proxy pointcloud could be nice for these cases.
Has some way to access the advanced render options? render settings look very basic on unreal interface, no 'max ray intensity', 'override material', 'max transp level', 'dynamic memory limit' or 'color mapping' settings.

thank you

[Alexander.Atanasov]

Hi, Wilsimar

Nice to hear that the vrmeshes worked out for you. We will continue work improving the proxies with different preview options, reloading and other. We will make an announcement when these features will be available.

no 'max ray intensity', 'override material', 'max transp level', 'dynamic memory limit' or 'color mapping' settings

We have plans to include the Override mtl in the plugin and also there is a poll which you can check here:OverrideMtl poll. Can you give more information why do you need control over the 'max transp level' and 'dynamic memory limit'? Regarding 'color mapping settings' we have Reinhard burn value parameter in the Color Mapping category inside the VRayPhysicalCamera:Color Mapping. Or are you using other type of color mapping? Give us an example of your workflow.

Best regards,
Alexander

[wilsimar]

Thank you Alexander for your support.

[QUOTE=Can you give more information why do you need control over the 'max transp level' and 'dynamic memory limit'? [/QUOTE]

For performance reasons, so many overlapping alpha planes transparency leaves slowdown the any raytracer render, then lower transparency depth level can speedup render for some scenes.

Dynamic memory limit seems have better memory use if set to 80-90% of my ddr.

'Max ray limit' and rendertime ('non post') tonemap seems can speedup render for some high energy scenes.

Vray vfb don't keeping settings if I close it after any render.

I have noted vrayforunreal textures are rendering more sharp that 3dsmax, there are no texture filters on vray for unreal or this is another thing?

[s.balabanov]

Hello Wilsimar,
Thank you for the clarification.
V-Ray for Unreal uses adaptive algorithms that allow it to optimize itself for multiple aspects, so you don't have to optimize it yourself. One such example is the transparency tracing - V-Ray will render the appropriate depth and reduce it when not needed.
As for dynamic memory - what scene did you perform your tests on? Did you render on CPU or GPU or both? Can we have an example where we can reproduce the behaviour?
While Max ray intensity can help reduce firefly artifacts (very bright isolated pixels) it also can reduce the physical correctness of the scene. That's why it is not recommended to lower it too much. Again could you send us an example that demonstrates the behaviour you refer to?
The VFB fixes are on the "to do" list.
We have not exposed the filtering settings for textures, and all of them use a default setting. This is due to the fact that there is no blur radius setting in the UE texture settings. We can add a global setting for every texture. Would that work?

Best regards,
Simeon