hi, i got a tip from a friend who uses solidrock for a while. he says it speeds up his renderings done with max/vray quite a lot. he`s not very experienced with vray so i don`tknow if solidrock is just for newbies or also brings something for experienced users who know how to balance spped vs quality in vray?
Solidrocks automates all of the menial calculation to optimize settings per your image resolution. This in itself is pretty valuable to even an experienced VRay user. It isn’t perfect, but it does work very well on most scenes.
I have just simply never bothered myself with optimising everything and lived with mediocre settings and longer render times because I really don’t have time to trial and error to find the best settings for every render. Solidrocks actually get’s me at least 90% there in terms of optimal settings per scene/image, where I would only get to maybe 50% myself just on general knowledge of VRay, and I don’t have to do much more than click a few buttons.
I’d give it a good rating as well. Very helpful. I’m waiting for a few bugs to get cleaned up for my own more regular use (universal setting rendering a bit dark, matte objects not working properly etc. - fairly minor stuff really) but it’s handy for sure and Jerome is very helpful, which counts for a lot IMO.
b
SolidRocks
I use it on every job…it works great and I would highly recommend it.
Gets my vote too
Good to see all of the recommendations. I’ll have to look into this tool.
Buy it. You won’t be sorry and you will save a ton of time.
it doesn’t seem to be available for SP3a and max 2010 yet. Anybody have any info on this?
thanks for your replies,
seems to be very usefull, will give it a try.
Sp3 2010
I use it on Max Design 2010 with SP3 just fine. There is a gamma bug, but nothing you can’t work around for now.
Are you using it for still frame only or is any of you also using it for animation?
SolidRocks
The developer of SolidRocks has a free script for animations.
Anim script
I started using the anim script and it has been a great help!
Now 9 out of 10 anims work great, very little flickering etc and its still being developed.
Almost all anims done since are extremely predictable in their quality, some minor glitches probably due to me using lowest possible settings to see the results (oh and client demands).
laters
spike
Absolutely love the plugin, great helps.
Only one thing comes to my mind.
Why did not Chaos guys come up with something liek this?
I mean it almost take a scientist sometimes to come up and compute all the right values for rendergins manually. Solidrocks does this for you..and whats more…i finally understand how the numbers work together.
i really recommend this plugin, its cheap and it does wonders.
best regards
thanks guys for positive feedback.
Hope 'll be apart of beta tester program to anticipate what’s next into SolidRocks..
I’m working now on same kind of wizard than flythrough anim, but this time for full moving objects anim. Both of them will be integrated in the next build and will take benefits of solidrocks quality settings.
thanks
Great plugin, saved me loads of time and hair pulling (if I had some!) and its free!!!
laters
spike
Just a note regarding the flythrough wizard.
Looking at the tutorial video it seems like it is using the Nth frame technique for camera flythroughs which is obsolete by now.
The other plugin seems to add just another layer of abstraction over the vray interface.
It’s a nice idea but you have to understand whats going on in vray anyway and then it is just a matter of typing value X into the Solid Rocks interface or directly into vray.
It’s obsolete?
Last time I checked it was just another option. they have different pro’s and cons.
Thanks guys !
i’ve solved some problems in the 0.97 public build (gamma). right now working on animation tools. flythrough assistant is 95% finished for now. it’s completely integrated into solidrocks and takes benefits of its settings, and can automate all the process (prepasses, distributed final render..) in one go. there’s a time estimator inside, and many tools to control each step (LC size and quality, IM samples disrib and quality…).
The full anim tool will be faster to implement, as it’s simple in terms of methodology.