Arnold's new renderview (some nice features hope to see in V-Ray)

V-Ray V-Ray for 3ds Max General
1

Though it’s Arnold for Maya, I would hope some feature can be added for both V-Ray for Max and Maya.

Video demo is here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RIiMRgNpB4&feature=youtu.be

highlight some features that I presonally am interested in seeing in V-Ray

  • detachable camera view link between viewport and render view with a hotkey to toggle the link.
  • toggle on/off progressive refinement (not sure if this is even possible in V-Ray?)
  • select geo in render view for material/node editing
  • change render camera in render view without re-exporting the scene.
  • add AOV on-the-fly (if I see it correctly, the guy add AOVs and all of a sudden AOV channels pop up in render view drop down list and viewable without re-export the scene)
  • 3D manipulation in render view.
  • enable and render debugging channgles in render view. The Isolate Selected function is pretty cool.
  • link Hypershade shading node (material/texture) selection to “Isolate Selected” rendering in render view.
  • select a light in outliner and isolate its light contribution in render view automatically. (it helps explore each individual light’s contribution in complex scene)

BTW, not sure if has to do with the heaviness of the scene, but it feels the interaction is really smooth and low-latency.

2

Some features there were nice. I particularly liked the one where you can isolate each shader or part of its network its something I really have to manually do every time.

3

Jesus the last one where you can select and see the node in the material editor is awesome!

Stan

4

Most of that is already available with RT (CPU) as activeshade, no?
Except for the one-click material and object isolation.

5

Well that’s the most interesting part of the whole youtube presentation :slight_smile:

Would be a major time saver, really

Stan

6

The last part where he only renders out selected lights was nice.
One functionality above that again would be to place that light just like we can in many HDRI studio-rigs by just selecting the light, and pressing the “mesh” within the render, and the light would move to lit that part of the mesh, or from that angle outwards from the mesh’s normals.

Have a “place light x meters from selected mesh” as well, and it would be awesome.

7

Hello,

Yes there are some interesting features in this demo. Some of them are already (maybe partially) supported in V-Ray:

  • 3D manipulation in render view - this is already possible. You activate this mode with the right mouse button and options “Real zoom” or “View Navigation”.
    Real zoom - when activated you can do view changes without affecting anything in the scene:
    - zoom with the mouse wheel
    - pan with the middle mouse button
    - double left button click resets the view
    View navigation - for camera views - allows You to alter the camera from the VFB:
    - rotate with the left mouse button
    - pan with ALT+left mouse button
    - zoom with the mouse wheel
  • Isolate selected - You can use the Render Mask Selected from the production tab. Unfortunately for now it only works with the selected node at the start of Active Shade. We should probably allow the selection to change dynamically.
  • About the select geo in the VFB - this feature was available when using the Max frame buffer - right click and “Select object”. For now it is not present with the V-Ray frame buffer. (Also there seems to be some crashes with it in the nightlies but we’ll fix them)

Best regards,
Yavor

8

Yes, it’s a nice feature that Blender users know well using Cycles

I think someone has take inspiration from the feature called Nodes Efficiency Tools.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Nodes/Nodes\_Efficiency\_Tools

9

Maybe some stuff is already available in V-Ray Max, but definitely a lot of nice feature isn’t available in V-Ray Maya. Plus, a lot of stuff is achieved without re-exporting the scene.
Excerpt of highlighted features from official announcement below. These features can help a lot during look-dev and lighting. These are the ones I would LOVE to see the most in VFB.

  • Smooth, low-latency render updates take place while dragging the mouse rather than at mouse-release time.
  • Different cameras, AOVs and shading modes can be selected at any time, without re-exporting the scene.
  • Isolate objects, lights, materials, and even individual shader nodes for easier debugging of shading trees.
10

'fraid it does have to do with the scene setup.
The window is nigh useless in interiors, where tracing speed is paramount for multi-bounce GI: even at one fourth of the resolution (it’s progressive refinement -2/-1/0/render settings) it traces only a few buckets and then has to restart.

11

The one click material/object selection is based on a simple ID pass, nothing fancy at all.
If it returns objectId on pick with RT, i may even be able to script a simple callback.
Well, it does return the correct ID, but mouse cursor tracking isn’t ideal, i may not be able to script my way out of this… ^^

12

Agree Lele. I posted in another thread some simple test drive results with PRMan RIS, V-Ray RT, and Arnold here. Not a heavy or interior scene at all but I guess it still means a little bit in terms of how good the viewport is communicating to the render view in each renderer?
I guess it’s really hard for a heavy interior production scene to be decently responsive in viewport and othe panels when CPU is crunching anyway. Still, if Chaos Group can figure out a way to smoothly fuel back and forth some CPU juice back between VFB rendering and viewport/panel when user inputs are detected, it will be fantastic. How about a tick box to decide if the user want the RT to go full speed or throttled for better viewport/panel responsiveness?

13

Glad to learn it wasn’t some magic behind the scene. It would be nice to have out of box for VFB ins’t it? Users can dissect selected object(s) and partial shading node tree easier and isolate a light’s contribution in a complex scene easier without re-export the scene over and over again.

14

This surprise me a bit.
Would make sense if only the end shading material was rendered as masked.
But here we are talking about sub-matreial nodes as well.
I haven’t see a way to do this in vray, even without the interactive mode.
If you have a mtl with diffuse, reflect and refract and would like to see only the diffuse map, you should either disable all the other component of your mat to see the diffuse (could be like 20 clicks) or create a new material and apply the same diffuse and apply the new mat (10 clicks)
Where as here, they select the diffuse map in the material editor (1 click), PAF if renders ONLY the diffuse map

Make sense?
Stan

15

Eheh, yes and no.
They are only able to select geo from the VFB, and the exceedingly well set up scene lends itself to be misinterpreted (see 2:30 and thereabout).
The only thing they have is a clever no-export strategy, but that’s all the way it goes as far as i could tell.

The shading graph bit is a nice trick (vrayExtratex/vraymtlselect + exclusion list, in our money).
I’m not saying it wouldn’t be useful (although i scripted my way out of this a long time ago in a hacky, but working -for me- way), but i’m also thinking of the max material editor with its ability to show partial results (this, since max 1) and custom previews, entirely lacking in maya.

16

Well, iRay seems to be using a totally different engine for their interactive renders than the production one(s), tuned for speed at the expense of caps imposed to one or the other feature (GI bounces/reflections and so on).
That’s a solution for interactivity (along with lower priority cpu/gpu usage, i agree), but as far as i can tell also a recipe for destruction, if the scene is complex enough, with results potentially very different in final renders than they could be gauged from the interactive.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. ^^

17

Isn’t iRay a GPU-based raytracer? I presume when GPU is crunching for rendering, the CPU can be used for keeping viewport and all other panels fairly interactive…I could be totally wrong tho…

18

We should ask the RT team for clarifications (I would surely misuse the terms.), but i believe if your GPU is entirely occupied, you wouldn’t even be able to see the mouse move (the CPU may well know where it is, but still has to ask the DX acceleration to draw it, and that’s through the video card…
iRay can though use either, or both at the same time.
However, the interactive sampler isn’t the fully-fledged, final render one (which comes with two options for caustics and architecture, either of which can change the look fo the render quite dramatically, and not necessarily for the better.).
It’s a cut-down version with limited effects and bounces, so to give a good general impression of what’s happening even in complex interiors.

This said, the speed difference in BF GI tracing between Arnold and iRay (i won’t mention V-Ray to add -little- weight to my unbiasedness in this) is in the order of four times (in favour of iRay) when i last tested them (that’s last week.).
Arnold’s issues aren’t in the quick preview window, imho.

EDIT: let me explain the above a bit better, Blago correctly pointed out that if i tested iRay with CPU+GPU rendering, and Arnold with just CPU rendering, i was comparing apples to oranges, and doing quite the disrespectful service to Arnold.
Guilty as charged, i replied, in that this was not meant as an outright benchmark of the raytracing code performance, clearly invalid as ran on two different hardware setups.
But i also defended the comparison within the frame of “out of the box” usability.
Maybe Arnold is aimed at a different market, and that’s why they show the feature on characters, but the iRay preview window does what they show on their videos, on my simple workstation, with architectural interiors (say, 15+ effective bounces of GI are often needed), whatever corner it cts to get there.
Arnold’s preview window in that situation becomes unusable on the simplest of scene (geometrically) because it’s ill-suited at handling multi-bounce GI (then add glossies, sss, and so on) due to its inherent design architecture, which is non adaptive (so one gets a ray explosion as each bounce shoots the square of the incoming rays…).

I shall endeavor to test the two side-by-side in as close a setup as possible (not just CPU or GPU), but the fact remains: when i compare the most common renderers out there (i am curious, and tested them all quite thoroughly. But say us, iRay, rMan, to name three) to Arnold, the test goes in one direction only: i have to reduce the features used by the other renderers to match the ones in Arnold.

P.S.: outlandish and arbitrary my claims may seem, i invite you all to download the demo versions and try them out for yourself.

19

The asset used in the demo video is available here with the HDR env map. It’s easier now to set up an apple to apple comparison to check the performance and features.

EDIT: honestly, I care less about the raytracing performance (in terms of how fast the render is cleaned as long as it’s a significantly slowdown) in this case but more interested in the interactive performance, less scene re-exporting, and couple features.