I feel like the last 6 months working with VRay has become, for me, less and less productive, while becoming more and more frustrating. I’ve been putting off posting a thread like this for a while, but I think it’s time.
The way I work means the production renderer itself is great, it’s using RT or IPR in early project phases when my problems begin. Without an interactive/realtime option, my job would be much more difficult I admit, so thanks for the effort on that front, but after trying out a competing product recently, it makes VRay look dated and unstable in the area of interactivity. Even as I’m writing this, im suffering constant crashes and instability. It’s really quite astounding when you take a step back and think about how much time is wasted on this.
- IPR I find to be very unstable and prone to crashing max, and without support for atmospheric effects it becomes for me, almost completely useless. A robust, fully working version of IPR is the dream.
- Having to switch between GI engines, and image samplers becomes a pain in the bum. BF+LC+progressive is my setup for IPR, but not for production for example.
- Speaking of random issues, see the attached image. This is the first time I’ve ever seen this (forest pack showing up as the display proxies). Refresh interactive rendering button doesn’t fix this.
- Hiding a layer…maybe not now, maybe not in 10 minutes, but at some point it WILL crash max. How can one report such inconsistent bugs?
- RT is even more painful to use. I would not use it, but the instability and lack of atmospheric effects in IPR means I always roll back to RT (cpu). I find RT to be such a mixed bag as to make bug reporting pointless. For one I find it to be slower than competitor’s interactive offerings; perhaps not in brute speed, but in how much time is spent starting, stopping, crashing, etc etc etc.
- Somethings prompt an RT update, others don’t. Using the re-initialize function doesn’t seem to do anything, so a full scene recompile and waiting for RT to get up and running again is required every 5 minutes or so,
- Sometimes I get a total max lockup when an RT session is ended, requiring me to close the max session in Task Manager
- Changing the FOV using the UI shortcuts (bottom right of screen) doesn’t prompt an update.
- Atmospheric effects cannot be enabled or disabled, they must be deleted or RT restarted in order to switch them on or off.
- These RT errors that request a restart of max are so painful.
Some other things
- The new Physical Camera and exposure system is a joke. Please give us back the old system.
- Lens effects are confusing and aren’t user friendly. Why does using glare seem to totally disable bloom effects?
- LUT support is, while “correct”, not lending itself to creative use so I’ll ask again: please give us an opacity slider/spinner for LUTs in the VFB.
- Filmic tonemapping options. Again, perhaps this sort of thing isn’t “correct” but using the curves adjustments in the VFB is fiddly and frustrating. I know you don’t want to hear me compare VRay to other engines, but Corona’s VFB allows me to make a hard-sun daylight image look far far more realistic straight out of the VFB than VRay can, or at least with much less effort and fiddling. It seems like it’s a taboo to compare VRay to Corona on the forums, but let’s be honest here; they’re doing amazing things with such a comparatively small team.
- Does denoising work for render elements yet? I can’t seem to get a denoised reflection element.
- Bump and Normal mapping seems weak in comparison to Corona.
- The Vray2sidedmaterial just can’t cut it for nice looking foliage. Wasn’t a specific shader spoken of many moons ago?
- Make it possible to save an EXR from the frame buffer save button with all channels included. Currently only possible from the render setup window. (Update: possible to do so)
- Vrayaerialperspective is so good, but the way it affects passes other than RGB requires a second render just for clean passes.
- Clarify how VFB adjustments affect which passes saved from the VFB. Some are affected, some aren’t? Who knows?
- Implement a way to lock which view of RT and IPR is being rendered.
- CIE Overcast: I would be nice to have directional brightness based on sun position. At the moment it’s a pretty useless sky model. I use a desaturated CIE Clear as a workaround which isn’t desirable.
- Hosek sky. Love it, but really need brightness controls for better creative control.
- We can filter the sun color, but can we please have the option of tinting the sky too. Not with extra nodes and color correction workarounds.
- Add the ability to hide some objects from Wirecolor pass. This will aid masking of objects behind glass. Otherwise I end up with messy reflection passes, or on the other had I must re-render just for a second set of masks.
- Let’s be honest, Corona’s lightmixer is a remarkable tool, and I think anyone that has tried it, would love this sort of feature in Vray.
As much as some like to throw around numbers versing one engine to another and how VRay is fastest, it’s not about that for me. It’s about usability in the real-world. Day to day. Not a teapot in a room with a simple light. I’m talking about millions of polys, hundreds of lights, tens of thousands of proxies and whatnot. VFB control that allows for creativity, not refusal by Chaosgroup because it’s not “correct”. If we just follow the rules, we’ll never create the next best image. Give us the tools and control we need to create the imagery we want to. Honestly I would rather sacrifice 10% of VRay’s speed if only it was more stable and useable.
Using win 7, max 2016 and various versions of Vray both nightly, stable and official releases since the start of the year; all of these problems have persisted.
Anyway have a good weekend, and if I’ll update if more things come to mind.
- James
