I can finally share with you our first pieces of work rendered with Vray.
The main reason we chose to move to Vray for this project was because of Vray RT and it’s native support for geometry lights and the ability to interactively light the car using our light streak rig. (something not possible out of the box with our other renderers ;-))
We were amazed at how stable RT for Maya was in the beta stage and how much it supported.
Without Vray RT this job would have been pretty painful.
Look forward to using vray more in the future and meeting some of the Chaos team at FMX.
I got to use the car paint shader for the shots thanks to its release in the nightly builds. I did not use the flakes element though just because I did not get time when testing the shader to experiment with that part. We could see we could get results we wanted without them so we did not bother. But will definately be looking to use them in the future.
Most of my time was spent trying to match the vray car paint shader to custom measured brdf car paint shaders we have for mental ray. I got them in the region, not exact as not possible, but close enough, then played with getting a more extreme contrast effect for the style of the shots.
Yeah going ok. Trying to use it more at work. At the moment we seem to be doing projects of cars that we already have prepped for MR so quicker and easier with these to just stick with MR rather than move them to vray.
But working on a portfolio piece for a photographer at the moment and using vray for that.
Only struggle with it so far has been getting a correct working ground plane, shadow catching material. (That works like mip_matteshadow shader, with differential shading) Do not think possible yet.
well it works to an extent. I can catch the shadow fine but I want to project the backplate onto the ground plane so the car picks up the correct reflection from the ground. The plate being projected onto the ground plane should not pick up anymore light than it already has, so plugging it into the diffuse of a vrayMtl would be incorrect as it is then lit by the lights in the scene. However if I use a vrayLightMtl (or surface shader) the shadows do not calculate correctly on the ground plane, so I get correct reflection from the ground onto the car but with no car shadow information. Which is not right. (workaround would be to render a quick car shadow pass, comp that into the backplate and then project that) but would be better to be able to do it in one correctly.
Right I think I see, I’ll have to set up a test and follow what you’ve said.
If it is the case of it not working quite right, perhaps a new thread describing what you’ve said will help get it working like mip_matteshadow ?
Ah hah! I thought that looked familiar So you used vray for yours? That commercial was a mishmash of Mental ray, and the car being rendered somewhere else using
the Maxwell renderer, and us doing a pass on our end for reflection and putting it back on in comp. Crazy. … btw.. we switched to Vray after that.
yeah we switched and changed to vray specifically for this job as we needed the ability to use geometry lights with IPR (Vray RT). This was not possible with maya and mr.
Yeah when we received the initial cad data it had been prepped in Maxwell.
We have not completely moved over to vray yet, we are still trying to workout a good production pipeline with it and have been halted with that as a lot of pur recent projects have been to update old projects that were already set up and rendered using mental ray.
I see. Yeah, we set up some reflective tron splines as I suggested for the Lexus spot, and they integrated them, and called them “liquid light”.. these were
used for the reflection pass,.. though still in MR,. and added glow.
The decision to outsource the car to another studio without ‘our’ environment caused a lot of problems.
Btw.. check out Dryzen.com I think?.. they have a nice script to convert mr to vray… and mib x passes I believe for vray. Deex has a nice vray comp script too. (Deex vray fast)
my site www.johnployhar.com with a few more images and links to the Lexus spots
