Vantage Beta 3.0 Feedback

Vantage Vantage :: Issues
1

I’d like to share my experience with the beta, which started out good, but turned into me wanting to tear my beard off. I know it’s a beta and all, but man do I run into so many weird bugs.

I wanted to see how Vantage handled a somewhat VFX heavy scene with destruction. I wanted depth of field, motion blur, volumetrics effects.

First of all the destruction. I collapsed a building with the help of tyFlow. It was a heavy simulation and the only way to get it to render was to export it as a vrayproxy, the end result being 137 GB for 250 frames. Just scrubbing through the timeline was actually rather impressive at first. Sure, it took a second or two to load the frame, but it was cool navigating the destruction with proper lighting. But when it came to render it as an animation things started to fall apart. There seems to be a memory leak, so every 20-30 frames or so after the destruction had started, my memory would be full and I’d get a crash. It started at around 12-14 GB (64 GB in my system) and then just filled up the rest over time. Sometimes I needed to restart the whole computer in order to get Vantage to even start again.

I then encountered the next bug. Every time it crashed and I manually set off a new render, the VraySky clouds changed. It seemed to only be the cirrus layer though. I hadn’t touched the settings, it just changed, like you change the seed.

Many times after a crash, 3ds Max would be locked up and the close X button would be greyed out. Only way out was a force quit from the Task Manager.

Sometimes after loading the Vantage file as config (for the exposure settings), the exposure would look good in preview mode, but when rendering an animation right after, it ignored the exposure settings.

One bummer of a bug I found, when I finally managed to get my rendered sequence out, was that the Z-depth pass just changed range all of a sudden. So it would be usable up until a certain frame. Probably because I had to manually restart the render and it changed values all of a sudden. Never touched any of the Z-depth settings, it just changed anyway. Fortunatly I could generate a crude Z-depth in Davinci Resolve which saved me having to re-render for the nth time.

Enabling motion blur while also having VrayEnvironmentFog produces artifacts around high contrast areas. Only when rendering animation, not while in preview. I’m guessing it’s due to the velocity pass not being sampled enough, because I could somewhat reproduce the artifact pattern in Fusion with the velocity output from Vantage (attached image).

Cancelling an animation render before rendering sometimes locks 3ds Max.

Error windows always shows in 3ds Max, even when turning it off in V-Ray settings or changing verbose level.

Some suggestions for changes I’d like to see:

  • A way to connect the 3ds Max scene with a saved Vantage file so it loads automatically when launching Vantage. It’s such a cumbersome system where you have to save the Vantage settings separately and load it manually every time. Since I had to manually restart the render so many times due to the aforementioned memory leak bug this got tiresome very quickly.
  • Render time per frame disappears too quickly, please keep it longer. Or just keep it all the time, no need for it to disappear really.
  • Please display current frame number rendering in Vantage.
  • Please, please, set EXR as default output format. Or at least remember the last format I chose. Too many times it just defaulted to PNG. Also make EXR settings avalible.
  • A threshold for opacity clipping. When using some Quixel assets, they don’t render when using Clip for opacity, only stochastic. Don’t really know why, but if we could set (either a global or local) a threshold for where to clip the alpha, it could perhaps help.
  • An easy way to view the alpha channel. Maybe it was just me but I couldn’t find a way to view just the alpha.
  • I’ve seen videos on how to hide the UI in Vantage and just use it as a always on top viewport, but couldn’t find how to do that. Please make it more apparent, preferably a button next to “Always on top”.
  • Some kind of “Force re-sync” function. Some settings, like enabling and disabling VrayEnvironmentFog doesn’t reflect in Vantage, so a way to re-sync without having to close and start again would be nice.
  • And off course, proper VDB support, not just AUR. I don’t have Phoenix, so I had to render the smoke sequence for my animation with Arnold, a bummer considering volumetrics was one of the new things in 3.0.

All in all I want to like Vantage and use it in my projects, but it needs to be more bug free and more streamlined to work with.

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2

Thanks for taking the time. It’s too late now to change things for the official release - it’s very close. But we will keep improving things after that.

- We will address the supposed memory leak as soon as we can reproduce it.
- The random cirrus issue sounds very strange. It should be deterministic if it is animated. But it sounds like you’re controlling this from Max (as opposed to animated sun geolocation + wind in Vantage), so we render whatever V-Ray exports.
- When you’re rendering a live link animation there should be a small progress window in Max with a “cancel” button - was it not visible when you say Max locked up? Maybe it was hidden under some other window?
- Exposure settings in offline render mode depend on the selected camera. If you modify a camera you also need to save it if editing in Vantage.
- The scene size (bounding box) used to normalize Z-depth is updated when objects are created in live link. Frame updates are live link updates in practice, so they could affect this size. Also if you crash and load the scene again in a different state the scene size may have changed. I guess as a workaround if you go to the first frame before starting live link and go back to the frame in the middle after that you can avoid the issue.
- “Error windows always shows in 3ds Max” -- is this the V-Ray log? This is controlled by V-Ray, it’s bugging me too.
- “Render time per frame disappears too quickly” -- is this the status bar text? You can see it in the debug log (Help menu) and you can keep the log window and filter for this text. The status bar is not a place for permanent text.
- “Please display current frame number” -- we do display it, can you clarify?
- I understand your frustration with default output format, it’s a small thing that we could have improved but had other priorities. Will log the request. Not sure if we will make EXR the default because lots of people use PNG too, but if the last used format is remembered it should suffice. We’ve also added a DWAA/DWAB option in global settings.
- The “hide UI” hotkey is listed in Edit->Mouse and key Shortcuts. We will consider making it more visible.
- The Environment Fog not updating is an issue in V-Ray itself, I would bet it’s the same in V-Ray IPR. It happens with other settings too. It should be addressed in V-Ray.
- We’ve already added VDB support, I think it was included in the 3.0.1 beta. It will be in the final release anyway.
- Any other things you mentioned will also be taken into consideration by our product manager.

3

First of all the destruction. I collapsed a building with the help of tyFlow. It was a heavy simulation and the only way to get it to render was to export it as a vrayproxy, the end result being 137 GB for 250 frames. Just scrubbing through the timeline was actually rather impressive at first. Sure, it took a second or two to load the frame, but it was cool navigating the destruction with proper lighting. But when it came to render it as an animation things started to fall apart. There seems to be a memory leak, so every 20-30 frames or so after the destruction had started, my memory would be full and I’d get a crash. It started at around 12-14 GB (64 GB in my system) and then just filled up the rest over time. Sometimes I needed to restart the whole computer in order to get Vantage to even start again.

Would it be possible to send a scene to support that shows the memory leak ? We are aware of one issue with ForestPro, but not tyFlow.
Is this reproducible if you export to .vrscene and render the animation from within Vantage with no 3dsMax involved ?

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

4

We will address the supposed memory leak as soon as we can reproduce it.

Would it be possible to send a scene to support that shows the memory leak ? We are aware of one issue with ForestPro, but not tyFlow.
Is this reproducible if you export to .vrscene and render the animation from within Vantage with no 3dsMax involved ?

I couldn’t get a vrscene out of it, but here’s a link to the VrayProxy. It was 124 GB, not 137 GB as I previously stated. Please let me know when you’ve downloaded it so I can delete it, as it’s quite large =)
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/x851utdrga5mttmqhlju4/hammertime\_.vrmesh?rlkey=r8c1agn4cfz8dr83hmfrqcp7d &dl=0
After 140 frames, the destruction starts, which fractures and spawns many objects every frame. I just tried it in a new 3ds Max scene, just the VrayProxy, VrayLight and PhysCamera.

This time it made it to frame 157, which is included for reference.​

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Now after the crash, 3ds Max has a greyed out X-close button.

The random cirrus issue sounds very strange. It should be deterministic if it is animated. But it sounds like you’re controlling this from Max (as opposed to animated sun geolocation + wind in Vantage), so we render whatever V-Ray exports.
It wasn’t animated at all. And now when I look at an early preview, it’s clear it’s just not cirrus that’s affected. You can find the preview here:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/wkd5v7ohjjd5uvnehxkvv/preview\_03.mp4?rlkey=3ikz9ey86gsmv4uht3g03b9sp&dl= 0

“Error windows always shows in 3ds Max” -- is this the V-Ray log? This is controlled by V-Ray, it’s bugging me too.
Allright, got it!

Render time per frame disappears too quickly" -- is this the status bar text? You can see it in the debug log (Help menu) and you can keep the log window and filter for this text. The status bar is not a place for permanent text.
Yeah, I meant in the status bar. As it’s visible there, it’s strange to me that it just dissappears so quickly. In 3ds Max, when rendering, you always have the last frame time. The log window works, but honestly, I didn’t even know there was one, as I thought the other V-Ray log that I complained about was connected to Vantage. And it’s also something that you have to remember to open, because as soon as you’ve started a render, the window is locked until Aborted.
And that’s something else I’d like to see changed. Why, when aborting a renderer, are we sent back to the standard preview mode? If I discovered I missed a setting (like changing back to EXR after it defaulted to PNG), then I have to launch an Animation render from 3ds Max again. Why not just let us toggle between the preview mode and animation mode? Like have two separate tabs.

“Please display current frame number” -- we do display it, can you clarify?
You display the number in the current sequence, yes. But in my example, I had to restart the render so I might render frame 45-250, which in Vantage reads “HQ sequence frame 1 of 206” and not that it’s actually rendering frame 45. And if you have Vantage set to Always on top and the window is covering the 3ds Max timeline, since the whole window is locked for movement you can’t see what actual frame is rendering. Even the debug log seems to just refer to the sequence. “Sequence aborted on frame 1 of 206”.

The “hide UI” hotkey is listed in Edit->Mouse and key Shortcuts. We will consider making it more visible.
Oh, how lovely! Thanks! Yeah, a button for it wouldn’t be the worst idea. Overall the UI still needs some work. Overall I think it works pretty ok, but please, make sure that the panels don’t change in width when resizing the Vantage window. If I set them to be the narrowest they can be, I want them to remain that even if I resize the window. But hey, 3ds Max’s Scene Explorer also sucks in that area =)

The Environment Fog not updating is an issue in V-Ray itself, I would bet it’s the same in V-Ray IPR. It happens with other settings too. It should be addressed in V-Ray.
Got it, thanks for the clarification. Yeah, it’s the same in 3ds Max.

We’ve already added VDB support, I think it was included in the 3.0.1 beta. It will be in the final release anyway.
That’s excellent news!

5

Is this a single render or several attempts stitched together due to crashes? I still have no explanation if the clouds are not animated in Vantage or Max/V-Ray.

make sure that the panels don’t change in width when resizing the Vantage window
I think we fixed this for 3.0.2.

6

Several attempts stitched together. I just loaded up 3ds Max after a crash and continued where it left off. The only way in the end was to render the background separately in order for it not to crash and change.

7

I couldn’t get a vrscene out of it, but here’s a link to the VrayProxy. It was 124 GB, not 137 GB as I previously stated.

I don’t actually have 128 GBs free on my machine in order to download it. I will see if someone else can.

What was the issue with exporting to .vrscene ?
Once you have the vrmesh exported and setup as VRayProxy in 3dsMax, the exported vrscene should be very small.
You don’t have to use the original non-vrmesh using Max scene, that would be very inefficient.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

8

I cancelled after about 20 minutes. It was just stuck at 94% or something. Might try again later and leave it for an hour or two.

We’ve already added VDB support, I think it was included in the 3.0.1 beta. It will be in the final release anyway.
I’ve downloaded the 3.0.1 version, but I can’t get VDB to render. Any extra steps needed than when usually setting up with V-Ray?

9

If you have the big stuff, like the tyFlow simulation exported as a vrmesh already, the export to .vrscene should be very fast.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

10

After a long time using Vantage as my main renderer I decided to switch to FStorm earlier this year since I ran into a lot of issues and frustrations like missing features such as glare which only arrived recently, poor motion blur, weak displacement, and a few other details

Then I saw the Beta announcement and decided to give it a try and honestly I’m pretty excited about what I’m seeing so far
Really liked the new interface, the partial PhoenixFD support, and I’ll be really happy once liquid support arrives

Here are a few points I’d like to highlight

Chaos Scatter has a limitation in standalone mode since we can’t add areas that would require splines and Vantage doesn’t create splines. It would be awesome if you guys added a spline system directly inside Vantage. A brush inside Scatter would also be super useful

Translucency (Vray2Sided) still bothers me. On curtains, when I add high translucency, they turn dark or blackish. That doesn’t usually happen in offline renderers. Not sure if it’s because of the limited 4 GI bounces or just a performance decision, but it would be great to improve that

Motion blur still needs serious work. I get that true physical motion blur is tough to implement, but even Unreal’s post process motion blur looks way better. Since Chaos seems to be positioning Vantage not only for ArchViz but also for VFX, I think good motion blur is really important

Sky tab could have something like the materials tab where we can add a Color Correction map directly to the HDRI. That’s essential since we often have to take HDRIs into Photoshop to tweak gamma, saturation and so on, and that’s a pain especially when dealing with 8K or 16K maps and saving multiple versions

Objects tab could include an option to create layers or group objects

Displacement is still a major issue. The tessellation mode isn’t ideal since you need heavy subdivision to get a decent result, and if you disable tessellation it eats up too much VRAM. Works fine on small scenes, but I made a full house in Vantage and it crashed when I turned tessellation off (I’m using a 5090)

Filmic tonemap tab comes with a preset look. It would be nice to have a zeroed default mode with no preset applied so we can build up only what we actually need

Render UI still has that old issue. If you hit render and the file has the same name, the rename or overwrite warning overlaps when “always on top” is enabled

New material creation feature I haven’t tested much yet but I couldn’t find an option to control Self Illumination intensity. I had to use a Color Correction map and adjust via exposure. Also having an option to replace materials by ID like Multi Sub Object would be great

Other than that everything’s working as it should. I tested the States which used to crash before and now they’re running perfectly

Big props to the devs, you guys did a great job and I think you’re heading in the right direction
You just forgot to hide FluidSim in the object filters, that’s a nice spoiler that liquid support is on the way, loved it haha

I used to compare Vantage to D5 but not anymore. I actually prefer how Vantage isn’t trying to oversimplify everything with that easy for everyone type of interface, that feels too limiting

Now I see it more like Chaos’ own version of Unreal and I think that’s exactly where it’s heading

11

Hi Pablo,

Thank you for the feedback and kind words!

Chaos Scatter has a limitation in standalone mode since we can’t add areas that would require splines and Vantage doesn’t create splines. It would be awesome if you guys added a spline system directly inside Vantage. A brush inside Scatter would also be super useful
Please add your vote to the idea here Spline creation | Vantage Ideas Portal

Translucency (Vray2Sided) still bothers me. On curtains, when I add high translucency, they turn dark or blackish. That doesn’t usually happen in offline renderers. Not sure if it’s because of the limited 4 GI bounces or just a performance decision, but it would be great to improve that​
This sounds like an issue we are aware of with the following setup: VRayMtl->MtlBump-Mtl2sided: https://drive.google.com/uc?id=14wwioasNx0I3KCa8Q2fRrK6VaqEsK0nS Is that the setup in your case? If not can you please send a sample scene to test it?

Motion blur still needs serious work. I get that true physical motion blur is tough to implement, but even Unreal’s post process motion blur looks way better. Since Chaos seems to be positioning Vantage not only for ArchViz but also for VFX, I think good motion blur is really important​
Please add your vote if you haven’t already to the idea here: Physically accurate motion blur | Vantage Ideas Portal

Sky tab could have something like the materials tab where we can add a Color Correction map directly to the HDRI. That’s essential since we often have to take HDRIs into Photoshop to tweak gamma, saturation and so on, and that’s a pain especially when dealing with 8K or 16K maps and saving multiple versions​
The 16k and 8k will also be problematic in our case because we would need to bake the color correction internally at that resolution which will have a performance impact. You can cast your vote if you haven’t already to the idea here: environment color correction slider (GI + | Vantage Ideas Portal

Objects tab could include an option to create layers or group objects​
Please add your vote if you haven’t already to the idea here: keep layers structure from 3ds max in objects | Vantage Ideas Portal

Displacement is still a major issue. The tessellation mode isn’t ideal since you need heavy subdivision to get a decent result, and if you disable tessellation it eats up too much VRAM. Works fine on small scenes, but I made a full house in Vantage and it crashed when I turned tessellation off (I’m using a 5090)​
For displacement we plan to look into some improvements in the future but cannot provide any more info.

Filmic tonemap tab comes with a preset look. It would be nice to have a zeroed default mode with no preset applied so we can build up only what we actually need​
I don’t think there are settings for the filmic tonemap that do not change the image at all but I will test more.

Render UI still has that old issue. If you hit render and the file has the same name, the rename or overwrite warning overlaps when “always on top” is enabled​
I have it logged in our system under LAV-2543

New material creation feature I haven’t tested much yet but I couldn’t find an option to control Self Illumination intensity. I had to use a Color Correction map and adjust via exposure. Also having an option to replace materials by ID like Multi Sub Object would be great​
We plan to have improvements for the material editor in the future and we will look into your suggestion. One other possibility is to put a Combine Color texture in the Self-Illumination and increase the Result multiplier. For the sub-level assignment please vote for the idea here: replace material of subobject , of | Vantage Ideas Portal

Best regards,
Alexander

12

Hi Undersky,
Unfortunately I couldn’t download the entire .vrmesh you have uploaded to dropbox, it stops or breaks halfway. Can you try to upload it on some other cloud hosting or archive it in a zip before upload?

Best regards,
Alexander

13

Hmm, weird. I don’t think there are any other cloud storages that lets me upload that huge of a file for free. But I’ll try zipping it and see what happens. It says it’s going to take 12 hours, so hang on for a bit =)

14

It took some time and the size didn’t change at all. But you can try downloading the zip and see if it works better.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/twl41nxh0bczea23xqd5s/hammertime\_.zip?rlkey=r13qxt3tnbvuc7lq925wx4vux&dl=0