We’ve just finished a large animation project using Vantage - overall, it’s been an absolute game-changer for us in terms of executing shots quickly.
Of course, there are some issues, and we’re aware that your Team is working hard to implement a wide set of features while maintaining the “instant GPU feedback” spirit of the software.
One thing that stands out more than others for us is the render elements part of things. We work with compositors, and the main thing that came up during the process is the usefulness of the render passes they got.
To bulletpoint:
Denoising of render elements. Currently, they are all very noisy, and they have to undergo a separate denoising process, which adds to the compositing time and complexity.
Not sure if standard denoising applies here, but technical passes like Velocity, ZDepth, etc. are also very jagged and noisy.
Velocity pass, apart from the noise, is very unreliable. There are frames now and then when it’s completely blank or very different from the surrounding frames.
It would be nice to get the ZDepth as a separate pass when rendering MultiLayer EXR, and to have more control of the range, filtering, etc.
Separate Glare / Bloom channel? Vantage has great Bloom/Glare options, but tricky to manipulate them after the render. Best case would be to have denoised Beauty and Glare / Bloom as a separate pass to comp on top with preferred opacity.
Translucency pass - VRay doesn’t have it, but it’s an amazing help with Corona - refining vegetation appearance would be great with it.
And the king of them all - Cryptomatte support - we’ve seen it’s already accepted on the ideas portal - so hope it arrives at some point
We’re not sure if some of the issues (like velocity consistency) could be resolved via rendering a sequence from the exported VRayScene instead of Live Link, but that’s our feedback so far.
To conclude, since the passes are available to select and render, it would be nice to ensure they are a bit more useful in the pipeline.
Velocity pass, apart from the noise, is very unreliable. There are frames now and then when it’s completely blank or very different from the surrounding frames.
Do you have messages like this in the Vantage debug log?
“Sampling counter desynchronized (actual X, expected Y). Applying correction.”
I think this may be related to the suddenly different velocity channel. There are some issues with update synchronization, but we haven’t found a robust solution so currently only this workaround exists. As you guessed, using a vrscene file would avoid this desynchronization issue and should produce a reliable Velocity. Velocity is currently always based on a single sample - we could look into improving that.
Are you rendering without any denoiser for the final render? I think I see a potential bug in the code that would prevent zdepth and normals from accumulating samples in this case.
It is expected that compositing elements like “Reflection”, “Lighting” etc. look noisier that their sum in the Raw RGBA element.
Hard to tell about the debug log, but we will keep an eye out for it from now on. Seems like VRScene is a more reasonable solution for final renders at this point. If, however, you can ensure more stability using the LiveLink, that still would be great!
We are rendering with Intel Denoiser with only the final pass option selected.
It’s understandable that individual elements might be noisier, but it seems like they aren’t denoised at all, no matter the settings?
Yes, we only denoise the “beauty” image, not the elements.
Hard to tell about the debug log, but we will keep an eye out for it from now on.
You don’t necessarily have to open the Vantage log window, there are icons at the bottom left of the status bar indicating the number of errors and warnings since a scene was loaded.
Thank you for the feedback! We have had previously requests for denoising and more control over the render elements and they are all logged in our internal tracking system. It is great that you have looked at the idea portal! I would kindly ask you in the future to write all future ideas there or vote for the already available ones there. Voting for ideas help us prioritize features. I cannot give you an estimation for delivery of the current features you have requested but we do have them in mind.
