shaders shaders shaders shaders 
Oh and I dont see volumetric caustics on that list 
(not really as handy tho)
I agree shaders…particuarly easier to control SSS ones…
But also, we do a lot of animation work, and even though a lot of it is only very short, flickerless, optimised GI would be a life saver.
I don’t need hour long frames every time i want to use GI and have something moving…any one who does any decent amount of animation will have a render farm to support them, but anything to get more animation done with a fraction of the stress…heavenly..
Like a DR manager program, so you can assign nodes in and out of a frame like you can with a backburner animation…that would be awesome…truely awesome…
I have been begging for node based materials (and modifiers) in max for a while. So If I can’t get them there, I want them in Vray. Or course, this would require some interface design (not a strong suit of vray). The power of vray is the power of its rendering engine. Interface… yikes… very powerful tools like PPT are in a single drop down menu.
Also… as far as flicker free animation, I have had little issues when properly optimizing my scene to get some great full GI anims done in a more brute force manner, and in reasonable time.
definately node based materials and more shaders!
morbid do you mean a sort of volumetric-shader?
Helium has gone ShaderFX. See www.lumonix.com
There was also an initiative to use it on an integrated compositor in Max over at the Frantic Films forum, but that never beared any fruit.
http://support.franticfilms.com/wb/default.asp?action=9&boardid=2&read=43&fid=14
I will post a more detailed description later on.
Well here is the description of shaders which I would like to see eventually intergrated into vray.
I would like to propose to separate all the layers of vray mat and expose them as single mats to be able to blend then with more control. Working with mental ray has really shown me a lot of shader power which mr has, that is at the moment is more powerful then what vray has exposed to avarage user.
Reflection - A separate reflection shader which will contain additional reflection paramiters like directional reflectance blur (UV spread) separate reflection paramiters for environment to support fake environment reflecitons which are not occluded by the objects in the scene. Reflectance weight (intesity) with controlable fresnel, like facing weight and edge weight. Samples. Reflectance dispersion. Anistrophy. IOR
Refraction - not a glass shader, but simply a refraction shader which would have additional paramiters to the refraction: glossy uv spread, environment refraction mapping which is not occluded by the objects. 3 layers for color such as front depth color, back depth color and middle depth color which can also be shader models. Refraction facing weights. Samples. Dispersion. Absobrtion. IOR.
Specular - a specular layer with additional controls: Overall specular weight, overall specular color. Specular spread, specular mode (blinn, phong etc).
Diffuse shaders - lambert, cooktorrance, oren nayar etc.
More powerful fast sss shader - shader which will contain multi layered options and would be dependant on the lightmap or similar method.
Bump shader - similar to mr vector bump, so that all of the above written layers can pass through the bump.
Physical sss - shader which can contain only sss layer.
Glass shader - shader model which can contain glass paramiters similar to maxwell. And perhaps various glass types.
Metal shader - shader model similar to maxwell metals.
Carpaint - carpaint shader with controls for flakes, diffusion, reflectance.
Thanks! I hope 1% of these will be implemented some day!
All good points…
A few more… (these are more geo, but also related to shaders)
Displacement - More optimization and options for displacement shaders
Hair Shaders for production - the current vray one is only really usefl for things like grass.
A shader that can read BRDF scans
A proper fast skin shader (related to fastsss)
voxel based volumetrics
Like jujubee wrote: “a simple water mat possibly even capable of producing foam. A simple height, roughness, clarity, color with automated transparency/depth (the fog parameter is confusing atm), and possibly a smart caustics parameter”
That would be usefull for me.
Another material I’m still not satisfied (from what I got and what I saw here) is stainless steel for appliances.
What would be very very very nice is a few step-by-step guides by somebody like Vlado who could write the definitive article about, for example “setting your system and software to get the best results color-wise” so we stop reading thousands of posts on subjects like LWF. These of course would be updated with each version of VRay.
Right now the examples gives us an idea of what the parameters do but I think it’s not enough. It could be augmented, synthetized, put in nice formats with tables… An example is the caustics, it could talk about a few common scenes setups (a glass of water, a swimming pool, the ocean. The units used and what is affected by them)
I know it very laborious to make something like this but I think it would help a lot of users save a lot of time by getting most setting near a usable result faster.
And Vlado, thanks for asking us!
-Marc
Material-wise, I’d like to see some more options for the vraysky material-like the mental ray sky. There are options for things like mapping the haze, etc.
Also, the new rounded edges option in the MR materials is really cool and would come in really handy for archviz work as an alternative to chamfering every edge in a scene.
Vlado, I’m sure you now realize what a can of worms you have opened, but I really appreciate you taking an interest in our needs.
I agree…
I’d like to see a true volumetric shader which can be used to create clouds and smoke.
It would be great to be able to define your cloud shape with a basic mesh and then apply a volumetric shader to it (using procedural noise to define the volume) so that you can create photorealistic clouds which can be animated.
This would go hand in hand with the vray physical sky.
To add to mine from some good shouts, volumetric shaders and a decent auto-fillet would be excellent.
+1 on the rounded edges shader
thats a killer shader in mr
it makes you arch viz stuff was faster as every surface isnt bevelled in geometry.
Re: +1 on the rounded edges shader
That particular effect you can get if you use the already available f-Edge plugin.
Best regards,
Vlado
i also want f-edge built into the vray material, like with mental ray.
and volumetric lights/fog.
and to be able to assign shaders to lights, like with mental ray. (for material-independent ambient occlusion).
and better UI design. it’s getting cluttered with all the cryptic special-situation checkboxes.
i can only imagine that vray in it’s current state would be quite overwhelming for a new user.
I like the UI the way it is, it’s good that it still takes a little expertise to do our job.
When it gets too simple it attracts people like the maxwell users
jokes aside, I quite like the UI as it is. I imagine changing it drastically would do more harm than good.
i see no point in changing the ui; its imo a waste of time. If vray is to claim a place of professional production ready tool, the power will come from advanced settings, powerful shaders and etc. I could see down the road something like special presets, like what mr in maya has.