This could work, but it must be implemented on the 3ds Max side, because 3ds Max must coordinate the render start/stop at the appropriate times - i.e. it must stop the rendering before the changes are made to the scene; wait for the renderer to finish; make the changes; and then restart. It must also tell the renderer exactly what changed between the stop and the start, so that the renderer can potentially update just the different parts of the scene and restart as quickly as possible. This is what Softimage is doing in fact, and while the implementation is far from perfect, it does a decent job.
The fact that you have to duplicate everything is a huge pain, that’s one of the largest disadvantages of mentalray, so its a shame that you have to do the same to get the interactive rerendering to work. I guess no one on the 3dsmax team is willing to change the architecture to allow you to circumvent this issue :)It is quite a bit of work and I think this was perhaps one of the goals of the whole XBR thing, but it seems that sadly that initiative ended up nowhere. In any case, we’ve implemented interactive renderers in Maya, 3ds Max, Softimage, web browsers, standalone apps and I’m still not sure what’s the best way to approach it
Guess I’ll just have to live without it then, since plugins are so important to max’s usefulness, and I would imagine it would be impossible to write vray translators for every max plugin out there, the job just seems too large.Which is why I’m hoping that one day 3ds Max would allow easier interactive re-rendering with the production renderer
Best regards,
Vlado