3dsmax 7.5 and VRay [updated]

There seem to be several issues that have appeared with 3dsmax 7.5. Since we have not yet tested VRay with this 3dsmax version, it may take some time to adapt to any changes. It is also not clear whether those issues are bugs in VRay or in 3dsmax. The fact is that some of them are specific to max 7.5 and were absent in previous versions.

(*) Hair Extension in buffer mode doesn’t render in camera views. Renders fine in perspective views though. [fixed in 1.47.02]
(*) UVW mappings may appear randomly distored. Seems related to the Autodesk VIZ extension. [fixed by Autodesk with a hotfix patch]
(*) Longer render times (apparently reaching as much as 4 times longer). [we could not reproduce that]

If you are aware of any other issues, please post them below.

Best regards,
Vlado

As far as the UVW problems are concerned we have found that by renaming your plugin.ini file to plugin.ini_old and let max build a new plugin.ini file the UVW mappings are far more stable. That is to say that we have not run into any distortion yet… We then closed max and deleted the new plugin.ini file a renamed plugin.ini_old back to plugin.ini and the problem came back. Try at your own risk…

Also, will add that if we remove the following lines from our original plugin.ini file UVW is stable.

cebasdlu=C:\3dsmax7\cebas\cebasdlu\
finalRender Stage-1=C:\3dsmax7\cebas\finalRender Stage-1\
finalRender Plug-ins=C:\3dsmax7\cebas\finalRender_plugins\
finalToon=C:\3dsmax7\cebas\finalToon\

Just thought I would add…I personally have not yet encountered any of the UV issues with VRay (1.46.15). Nor have I seemed to experianced any dramatic increase in render times with the current project revisions I am working on (which was few months old). Over at the 3ds max forum, they might be showing some connection to the problems when using VIZ extension with Cebes products.

For the fun of it I tried to render Metroberlin’s flash light test scene. I have not scene the VRay message window fill up with green like that in a long time…

It’s full of warnings calling invalid surface normals and invalid geometric normals. I guess the warnings can be ignores as the scene looks to render fine.

It seems if you try to cancel a Batch Render job (not a network render) Vray doesn’t pick up on it and keeps on rendering.

Seems like VRayHDRI map doesn’t work at all.
Plz confirm this.

EDIT

It works… but damn 5minutes ago it didn’t :o

davision
PostPosted: Wed May 04, 2005 5:57 pm Post subject:
It seems if you try to cancel a Batch Render job (not a network render) Vray doesn’t pick up on it and keeps on rendering.

I have the same issue. If I render a job , & lets say half way through I dont like what I see I cancel the job…all my render farm computers will get messed up so when I make my fix and submit the projects again they all error out, I have to restart the spawner evertime I cancel a render! It sucks doing this on 9 comps 25 times a day…is this a bug or is it my farm?

We made it easy to shut them down by making a batch file that shuts them down. But a batch file to start them wont work…the way windows reg works wont allow it…

to kill the spawner “Chris C” made this Batch file code:

pskill \\comp_name -u Username -p Password vrayspawner60.exe
pskill \\comp_name -u Username -p Password 3dsmax.exe

Currently this is expected behavior of Vray - its not a max 7.5 bug. Some people here in the forums have developed some pretty nifty scripts for managing vray rendernodes

Do you know of anyone who can get Vray to restart with no issue via remote? I’m sick of having to PC anywhere each time to start the servers. I can get it too shut down Vray but not restart!

do a search, and check out this thread:

http://www.chaoticdimension.com/forums/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10960&highlight=dr+script

well. we do not have the latest vray version installed, yet. But we also had several problems with 7.5 (backburner won´t start jobs and so on) wich all seem to be caused by the viz extension. Fortunately the viz extension can be uninstalled separatly. We also had a problem with texture coordinates
(correct displayed in the viewport but bogus when renderer with vray)
but I´m not shure if this was the same problem as described above.
In our case these problem only occured on 1 tga with alpha channel.. after converting it to a tif worked well again.

Cebas issue

I just experienced this horrible issue for the first time and thought I would go crazy. Apparently it appears in two ways - facetted object faces and UV map co-ordinates changing. I have just downloaded a new cebas.dlu from here :

http://support.discreet.com/webboard/wbpx.dll/read?215193,159

installed and it seems to be working fine. I hope this is the problem and I don’t have to uninstall the Viz extension.

The supposed update to 7.5 has quite a few bugs which I have experienced. Under no circumstances be tempted to install it if you work in a busy office. I have wasted many hours.

1) XREFs and network rendering - if you rely on XREFed scenes and network renders, there are SERIOUS bugs with 7.5. We are having to uninstall 7.5 from all of our machines because the XREF scenes do not come in at the correct scale. I see no acknowledgement of this anywhere. I have just been informed by a Autodesk representative that I should report a bug, but I don’t actually know how to go about this.

2) The real-world map scaling does not work properly. It works to 1000mm x 1000mm, but no bigger. If your maps are bigger than this (example a large bitmap of a brick wall, say 5000mm x 5000mm) this *feature* does not work. If you are in Metres, a box 10m x 10m x 10m will be OK, but try with 10000m x 10000m x 10000m and it will not work.

3) Netwrok rendering and large render sizes does not work. Renders work fine locally using bitmap pager, but sending large renders (ours are 16000 x 5344 pixels) to backburner causes a ‘error creating bitmap’ error. This worked fine with version 7 SP1. Possible workaround would be to render strips, but I don’t trust this with GI and Vray.

All in all, a pretty poor show from Autodesk/Discreet. Get your act together - we pay a lot of money for this software!

The bug report form is here:
http://www.discreet.com/support/max/faq/answer.php3?prod=dddstudio&id=1276

Geometry doesn’t cast shadows on hair&fur extention when using VRay shadows. Geometry does receive shadows from the hair with VRayShadows on the other hand.

Unfortunately, this cannot be fixed. You need to use shadow maps in these cases, or generate the hair as geometry.

Best regards,
Vlado

Tom… you will find that most hair methods, in any package, use shadow maps.

vlado, cpnichols,

I posted it here because as for as far as I know, it was not mentioned that it didn’t work with the hair. I have, indeed, always used shadow maps for hair and will continue to do so … there was just that little spark of hope it would work with the Vray shadows :wink:.

thx!

Tom

hi all,
i have little question … i have 3dsmax 7 + SP1 … what is my version on the 3dsmax??? maybe is 3dsmax 7.5???

10x

thats 7.1 not 7.5 sp1 had a few fixes. 7.5 was totally different since it had alot added for arch viz stuff if i remember correctly