So I know VrayHDRI has got HDRI in the name, hence these bitmaps would have a gamma correction of 1, but in general I’ve see a lot of people using this map for all their bitmaps, including textures painted in photoshop that have no High Dynamic Range, and need an inverse gamma of 0.455 applied. What’s people’s workflow in this case? Are you loading the bitmap and then setting the Inverse Gamma in the VrayHDRI map by hand? Or are most people still using the standard 3dsmax bitmap loader for 8 bit images, since it has its “automatic” mode to guess the gamma you want applied? Just curious at people’s workflow.
I pretty much always use VRayHDRI at this point. For textures that are non-linear you just have to switch the color space to sRGB (or “From 3ds max” if it’s set up correctly). No need to set inverse gamma.
It is faster, as far as I’ve tested.
It also has a bit better filtering options.
The main disadvantage is that it still doesn’t display real-world size textures in viewport and doesn’t allow interactive cropping (just manually entering coordinates.)
These two things are so annoying that for me the render speed gain is not worth the hassle.
I mostly only use the HDRI texture for loading HDRI panos for lighting. And then sometimes I’ll use the Bitmap to VRayHDRI texmap converter because I hear folks say it speeds things up, but I don’t think I’ve ever noticed.
I think there are two reasons I haven’t used it to replace the standard bitmap: the fact that I have to click more to use VRayHDRI, once applied I have to click yet again to load the texture. While the Bitmap loads the image browser immediately to pick the texture. And then the interactive crop tool is essential when you’re quickly building stuff and needing to crop. Bring those two features in and I might be able to replace the bitmap material.
The name VRayHDRI also makes it hard to learn to use it for everything and not only for HDRI textures/images. What about renaming it to VrayBitmap
Yeah i agree that changing that to VRayBitmap would be really good , as now it is being treated as HDRI map.
Maybe a dialog popup which will offer changing all VRayHDRI to VRayBitmap as with the new settings ?
Also would be really nice to have interactive cropping also , so it can be used in full.
You can keep the internal description as vrayhdri, just change the UI labels to say vraybitmap. Later on you can add a thing for maxscript when a user references vraybitmap, then vray knows to use the “internal” vrayhdri
Thanks for all the opinions. When I used the supplied vray script to change all the bitmap maps in my scene to VrayHDRI, it automatically set the gammas in each explicitely, so I didn’t know there was a “From 3ds max”, that’s good to know, and setting it like that seems to make the most sense to me.
If there is a way to change its name, that would go a long way to acceptance, as long as it doesn’t break old files.
I miss the crop window as well.
And I also found it a little weird that there’s the coordinates dialog in there that does nothing unless you use the “3dsmax mapping” mode. Because that dialog is there and not greyed out or anything, its not immediately obvious if its in use or not which is a bit of a pain.
I am used to dragging bitmaps etc. from xnview into the map slots. Don’t know how this happened, (i think it was a speed issue with loading maps over the network) but the nice thing is you can have all you textures visible and just drag the 1 you want into max. The vrayhdri does not allow you to do that, so you have to load maps from within dialog box. It would be nice just to drag and drop the maps into the vrayhdri slot.
The big advantage of the VrayHDRI (to me) is the elliptical filtering mode which makes textures on oblique angles look much nicer than the standard map filter.
Hello, when using the script bitmap to VRayHDRI, does it keep the output rollout settings intact ?
Because we use a lot of curves on my bitmaps and don’t want to lose those in auto convert
Also, does it behave well within a color correction ?
Finally, it adds an invert 0.4545 gamma, I guess that’s because max bitmap loader loads it with a 2.2 gamma when working in linear, correct ? Or is ignored if you use you use the “3dsmax mapping” mode ?
Ok, I made a mistake during my first tests, it does keeps the curve intact (I initially saw a flat curve but simply had to zoom because the range when from 0-1 to 0-10000… HDRI, of course)
Yes, there is no easy way of editing the output curves settings through MaxScript, so it just attaches the same instance to the newly created VRayHDRI texture. It’s there since 3.30.01.
…I also find this is not so nice…