Hello Vlado,
Well first off, I'd like to congratulate you guys on another excellent update. SP2 impressed me with a few new features that really improved my work-flow and compounded with the enhancements delivered with 3ds MAX 2011, I'm in high-poly heaven.
That being said, there are a few things I'd like to see which I'm sure is on your list of things to do, but barring technical feasibility and adequate testing, still have a ways to go. I will mention though, I'm not very familiar with how the coding side of this all works, so I'll be speaking from a "user-speculative" standpoint. Please forgive me.
Right now I'll mention my most desired feature; one you have probably already heard and may even have in some secret builds. Automatic image sequence generation.
With SP2, we now have a way to throttle the quality/time differential of an RT session. I would guess that in the engine, using the duration and quality mask as limits, once they are met, the engine is told to "STOP" and will wait for the scene to change. Is it possible for that "STOP" moment to trigger a "Save Image" command? Further more, if the parameters were set and interactivity with the scene was paused, could the "STOP" then "SAVE" be followed by "ADVANCE FRAME" and the process repeats?
I see a couple if's, like if the scene is simple in one shot but gets complex further along the animation, the timer limit will yield frames that are cleaner in some parts and noisier later on. Or (as I have experienced today) if you set a noise limit but a small glitch in the scene causes one small region to dwell for an unreasonably long time before the limit is reached.
Perhaps having a noise limit option that adds a supplementary time limit. Like: "Reach a .5 noise limit, but stop after 2 minutes regardless"
For pre-visualizing animations with respect to reflections, shadows, GI and now particles and proxies, this could be an incredible time-saver.
Now, I don't know how feasible it is to build this in to an ActiveShade renderer. Perhaps if the option to add it as a production renderer was added or have an "engine select" option in the VRay renderer that allows for the RT engine to be called in to start spitting out frames. I would imagine that could be a simple roll-out with RT specific controls.
Also if it was selectable through Vray Production, that may circumvent the extra work of having to mess with advancing the time-line and freezing the scene for rendering. Maybe we'd even get some post-effects available! Though I guess that depends on if the RT engine can give the effects the information they need.
Anyhoo, that's my idea. My intuition tells me that in the undefined future when the RT engine is "capability complete," GPU accelerated and in lock-step with VRay, they will merge to form a gleaming bastion of quality and speed the likes of which have never been seen, all on consumer-level hardware and at a reasonable price. But that's just a guess...
Maybe Vray/RT 2.5
Well take care and thanks for the excellent creative tools.
-EJDII
Well first off, I'd like to congratulate you guys on another excellent update. SP2 impressed me with a few new features that really improved my work-flow and compounded with the enhancements delivered with 3ds MAX 2011, I'm in high-poly heaven.
That being said, there are a few things I'd like to see which I'm sure is on your list of things to do, but barring technical feasibility and adequate testing, still have a ways to go. I will mention though, I'm not very familiar with how the coding side of this all works, so I'll be speaking from a "user-speculative" standpoint. Please forgive me.
Right now I'll mention my most desired feature; one you have probably already heard and may even have in some secret builds. Automatic image sequence generation.
With SP2, we now have a way to throttle the quality/time differential of an RT session. I would guess that in the engine, using the duration and quality mask as limits, once they are met, the engine is told to "STOP" and will wait for the scene to change. Is it possible for that "STOP" moment to trigger a "Save Image" command? Further more, if the parameters were set and interactivity with the scene was paused, could the "STOP" then "SAVE" be followed by "ADVANCE FRAME" and the process repeats?
I see a couple if's, like if the scene is simple in one shot but gets complex further along the animation, the timer limit will yield frames that are cleaner in some parts and noisier later on. Or (as I have experienced today) if you set a noise limit but a small glitch in the scene causes one small region to dwell for an unreasonably long time before the limit is reached.
Perhaps having a noise limit option that adds a supplementary time limit. Like: "Reach a .5 noise limit, but stop after 2 minutes regardless"
For pre-visualizing animations with respect to reflections, shadows, GI and now particles and proxies, this could be an incredible time-saver.
Now, I don't know how feasible it is to build this in to an ActiveShade renderer. Perhaps if the option to add it as a production renderer was added or have an "engine select" option in the VRay renderer that allows for the RT engine to be called in to start spitting out frames. I would imagine that could be a simple roll-out with RT specific controls.
Also if it was selectable through Vray Production, that may circumvent the extra work of having to mess with advancing the time-line and freezing the scene for rendering. Maybe we'd even get some post-effects available! Though I guess that depends on if the RT engine can give the effects the information they need.
Anyhoo, that's my idea. My intuition tells me that in the undefined future when the RT engine is "capability complete," GPU accelerated and in lock-step with VRay, they will merge to form a gleaming bastion of quality and speed the likes of which have never been seen, all on consumer-level hardware and at a reasonable price. But that's just a guess...
Maybe Vray/RT 2.5
Well take care and thanks for the excellent creative tools.
-EJDII
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