3ds max / BF - Visible to Camera Bug (Multisub Material Bug)

[salvadoresz]

3ds max, vray 5. I have 3 instances of an object. In object properties i select one as invisible to camera, all 3 objects missing from the render, although visible in LC pass. I then make these objects unique, so they're no longer instances... still the same problem... We're too deep into this project, so it would be very hard to go back to vray next at this point. Is there an alternative way to achieve "invisibility to camera"?

Its weird because if i make 3 spheres in the same scene and test this, it seems to work as intended, but not with the objects i have in the scene (simple objects themselves, but with many modifiers). I'll try to make some time to wrap up the scene and send it to support, and test some stuff myself.

EDIT: Seems like if the material assigned to these objects is a MultiSub material, the Visible to Camera function doesnt work as intended. Aka, all objects with the exact same Multisub material in the scene will disappear. If i make 3 copies of the material, and put it on the 3 objects, Visible to Camera works as intended again.

[hermit.crab]

Sorry for the late reply. I can't seem to reproduce the issue. Are you certain you weren't adjusting multiple object properties? Otherwise, you can untick Renderable in the object properties, assign a black opacity material, or a fully refractive material with an IOR of 1 for an invisibility effect.

[salvadoresz]

hermit.crab I rolled back the computers to vray next because i found alot of other things in vray 5 that didn't work as i expected, but unfortunately i don't have time to investigate. For example in vray 5 i noticed something weird when applying denoise, the colors shifted visibly, but if i disabled and enabled it, the colors jumped back to normal, and many other small things where i'm not sure if i'm doing something wrong or if its a bug.
Maybe in a few weeks i'll switch back to vray 5 and provide more meaningful descriptions of problems i run into

[fixeighted]

If it helps, I tried this now and it works as expected, even with instanced objects.
My guess is that it is one or more of the modifiers that is causing it.

[fixeighted]

In fact you are correct, visible to camera with this setup does not work - but only on GPU.
It is a bug mentioned in this post from years ago https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/...camera-and-gpu

[salvadoresz]

If it helps, I tried this now and it works as expected, even with instanced objects.
My guess is that it is one or more of the modifiers that is causing it.

I found the problem the day i posted this issue, and mentioned it above, its not the modifiers, its MultiSubMaterial. If i have the same multi-sub material on all object instances, and i hide one object from the camera (Visible to Camera), it hides all of the instanced objects. If i made separate copies of the same material for each object separately, Visible to camera worked as expected. Since then i formatted my drives, reinstalled everything, but because of plenty of other issues i found with vray5, i had to roll back to vray next.

But might be moving away from vray, i actually spent some time testing other engines, and feels like for the first time, vray is trying to catch up to alot of the features that some already had for a long time and they're no longer in the experimental phase (unlike some in vray).

Chaosgroup has two great products, vray and phoenix, but feels like their Nr.1 asset (the Legendary Vray) is being put in the trunk, and some small sidehustle like Lavina is put in the driver seat just so they can have an "Achievement Unlocked - Some sort of Real Time Rendering" . Time will tell how this is going to go down, we all know what happened to the Blackerry titans.

[salvadoresz]

two things keeping me from jumping ships, and there's probably many of us that have the same reasons. I have too much work, and jumping ships while going 3000km/h is risky. Second reason is Tyflow. I don't know any other plugin that's shaking things up so much, so fast, while openly and very boldly advocating for Vray (bunch of buttons and checkboxed in tyflow's UI labeled literally Vray). And what does the guy get in return, or we? A pseudo semi experimental instancing support for vray gpu, much like many recent things vray should be dominating like they used to.... while last time i heard, some other render engine, which is not named in Tyflow, managed to get full instancing support? Wow, thats crazy

[hermit.crab]

Indeed, it seems to affect V-Ray GPU. The issue is already logged (internal bug-tracker id: VGPU-5009) for developer analysis. I'll bump its priority additionally.