Wishing for vray compatibility

[Okpaku]

I wish there could be V-Ray for VW in 2019.

[Amorphous - Julian]

6 hours ago, Okpaku said:

I wish there could be V-Ray for VW in 2019.

 

I second this!

 

Has nemestchek/Vectorworks had any conversations with Chaosgroup?

 

 

[Amorphous - Julian]

On 8/12/2018 at 12:35 PM, Amorphous said:

 

I second this!

 

Has nemestchek/Vectorworks had any conversations with Chaosgroup?

 

 

 

@Jim Wilson can you kindly answer this? Have you guys explored this with Chaosgroup?
 

[PVA - Admin]

No official meetings that I am aware of. Engineering seems open to the concept of allowing alternative plug-in rendering engines, but I don't see that happening in the immediate future.

[Amorphous - Julian]

Thanks Jim. Perhaps its worth starting the conversation with Chaosgroup?

Revit already has this VRay plugin and users of Revit love it.

[PVA - Admin]

From what I understand, if we made the decision to make our rendering engine modular, then bringing compatibility to multiple 3rd party engines would be relatively straightforward. Once/if we make that call (personally I'm firmly in any camp that results in me getting more rendering tools regardless of where they come from) then the talk with specific developers will start. I think its more of a directional choice for us than a technological one.

[Okpaku]

I hope Nemestchek/Vectorworks make this happen. Vray is probably the most realistic renderer out there and to ignore this could make users look else where for a modeller that does. Vectorworks need to move with the times or could die; see what happened to Nokia. Having choice is a good thing, especially if it makes customers happy. Autodesk have embraced Vray why not Nemestchek?

[zoomer]

I think the problem would be more if Chaos Group is interested at all

to port VRAY to just another App platform that may not have a large

user base and also a large degree of Mac users.

[grant_PD]

At this point I think that network rendering would be the most valuable improvement to rendering in VW.  C4D's network rendering has effectively doubled my output in terms of quantity and quality without me having to purchase anything or learn anything new.  I grow so tired of waiting for viewports to update.  

[PVA - Admin]

16 minutes ago, grant_PD said:

At this point I think that network rendering would be the most valuable improvement to rendering in VW.  C4D's network rendering has effectively doubled my output in terms of quantity and quality without me having to purchase anything or learn anything new.  I grow so tired of waiting for viewports to update.  

If we decided to go modular with rendering, this would effectively be guaranteed functionality. We've been in talks with MAXON to get access to Team Render, their distributed rendering system, but I don't know where those led yet. However, nearly ALL the options we are considering have built in solutions for render farms of one type or another, which we would inherit by adopting their tech.

I have a whole training room here in the office filled with iMacs that I want to bend to my will.

[arqteran]

I work with Vray without problems in most cases, the .fbx file it's really versatile and exports everything to 3ds max and them I work with the file within 3ds max with Vray as selected render engine, it would be great to have a direct link to Vray but most of the advance mapping tools that comes with cinema 4D and 3Ds Max are a requirement. 

I tested Corona and it's a direct competition to Vray, I would like to see more information about a direct (interactive) link, I know there is a good one with cinema 4D, but I haven't seen something like that working with 3ds max...  

Edited August 30, 2018 by arqteran

[zoomer]

There is VRAY for C4D too.

So you have both, VRAY and Exchange.

 

I personally would like to get a similar VW Exchange, like to C4D,

but to Modo.

(And VW supporting Linux)

 

BTW

VRAY, or better Chaos Group, bought Corona and its developers.

[Jershaun]

Firstly, before any render engine is considered, VW needs to add UVW texture mapping and the mapping tools that go with that. Also, generally better mapping tools with regard to the other mapping options.

 

Secondly, an alternative to Vray, would be Thea Render and/or Octane Render. I think dealing with Altair and OTOY may be easier than Chaos Group or at the very least, Altair and OTOY may be more willing to help with the VW integration.

 

These render engines have been "plugged into" C4D which kind of looks like a native renderer in C4D. So, I'm sure it's more than possible to plug these render engines into VW. As far as I know, there is 1 person responsible for the C4D/Thea plug-in so I'm sure it is do-able eg. instead of spending resources on the "image effects" feature, this engineer could have made a Thea/VW integration.

 

Also, the future of rendering is moving more into real-time ray-tracing. Nvidia has released the RTX cards which will support this with render engines like Thea and Octane. We should be careful about adapting technology that is only current but instead select one that is future proof. Another advantage to real-time rendering, if not obvious by now, is testing materials and/or scenes and seeing the impact on the design immediately. Waiting for a render to complete is over.

 

Just my 2c. 😉

 

 

[PVA - Admin]

7 hours ago, Jershaun said:

instead of spending resources on the "image effects" feature, this engineer could have made a Thea/VW integration.

Stay away from the whole "This engineer was working on X when I actually wanted them working on Y" mentality please. It doesn't help the community nor does it help development after the fact. 

 

7 hours ago, Jershaun said:

Also, the future of rendering is moving more into real-time ray-tracing. Nvidia has released the RTX cards which will support this with render engines like Thea and Octane. We should be careful about adapting technology that is only current but instead select one that is future proof. Another advantage to real-time rendering, if not obvious by now, is testing materials and/or scenes and seeing the impact on the design immediately. Waiting for a render to complete is over.

Vray has also mentioned that they will be able to take advantage of RTX with their new RT renderer shortly. All the major ones will likely have it before we end up with a modular render system of any kind, and developing it for one just makes it easier to keep adding more.

[zoomer]

RTX is very interesting, more for 3D DCC than for Gamers.

 

Raytracing is what we (CPU Rendering) used to do since since more than 2 decades.

(Beside Scanline Renderers in 3DSMax and such)

And what is done on standard GPU cores since GPUs were used for Rendering, just

not in realtime so far.

 

Realtime Raytracing in 3D DCC Software as in Games may need some time to

finally get broadly support before you can make real use of RTX cards.

Blender and VRAY announced support and work with NVidia or vice versa.

 

Letting RT stuff beside, looks like for current technologies the RTX cards will

not improve much over their predecessor GPUs but have a steep price scheme.

 

For RT, there was a similar presentation of a Realtime GPU Rendering 2 years earlier,

with nearly the same features, which died soon as said there was no market for it.

NVidia has the power to pusht such things though.

 

The RT hardware acceleration works by 2 stages, special RT hardware acceleration

cores + Deep Learning AI cores, which will "guess" the Pixels they need to skip

to make it "realtime".

I have no clue if their current 6 or 10 GRays are much or enough. As I heard you

can also get 6 GRays by a usual Mobile GPU on an ARM chip.

And I don't know how that relates to and how many "GRays" a 32 core 2990WX

Threadripper has. I heard that such processors render faster than current GPUs

when added to a Hybrid Renderer like AMD Pro Render.

There aren't any real and independent benchmarks before official release in a

few weeks.

Many expect that NVidias 7 nm switch next year will be a much bigger step

than this years and will skip a generation.

 

Not sure about RTX for Mac users.

I don't think Apple will use or officially support NVidia again in the near future and

I wouldn't bet on Apple allowing NVidia to circumference by their own driver support

forever, like it currently works.

So it may not be very likely that 3D DCC Apps will provide much RTX support for

their macOS supported App branches.

 

 

But for the lucky ones on Windows or Linux platform RTX is still a very interesting

development and I am very curious about the final benchmarks. If that is already

a breakthrough or maybe take another 1-2 generations.

 

[rb-arch]

On 8/22/2018 at 4:21 AM, zoomer said:

I think the problem would be more if Chaos Group is interested at all

to port VRAY to just another App platform that may not have a large

user base and also a large degree of Mac users.

 

This is precisely the group in the market that is underserved.  We use Artlantis and get decent results, but it is buggy and not well supported.  We've been looking for an alternative and there is none.  There's no way we're buying cinema 4D to get to V-ray etc.  We've tried everything, Twinmotion (bad renders), Lumion (won't work fro Mac), V-Ray (can't get there from VW), etc.  

 

For us, it is becoming unacceptable.  The Mac users are being stranded.

[Kevin McAllister]

1 hour ago, rb-arch said:

The Mac users are being stranded.

 

This post in a similar topic might be of interest to you - 

Kevin

 

 

 

[zoomer]

Blender 👍

[JRA-Vectorworks-CAD]

@Okpaku Vray for Vectorworks does have a great sound to it and would be welcomed also as well as the Twinmotion Live Sync features.

[cool_as_sauce]

If this helps Octane Standalone plays very well with FBX export, it's so straight forward. Sure you will need to build your materials from scratch or use their LiveDB to find some good starting points like in any new renderer.

 

What we do in class is look development and scene visualization for VFX, we don't use VW for technical architecture but for quick architectural design drafting when creating scenes and that's something VW excels at unlike Archicad/Revit and even your usual suspects such as C4D/3Dmax. Our workflow relies on rendering somewhere else instead of Renderworks so we pretty much got it where we need it, we don't bother with renderworks textures we just apply solid fills for better ID purposes. If you happen to have C4D then export is straight forward and you can do whatever you want with it but we don't use that for one reason or the other. So far we had huge success with Octane Standalone for both exterior and interior and with Keyshot in interior scenes. Keyshot has a nice feature of updating the geometry when reimporting the FBX/3DS from VW which gives you a leeway to go back to VW and make some changes while retaining material information. We even had a great deal of success with Clarisse when it comes to scattering the VW model all over the place for nice cityscape wide shots. 

[rb-arch]

Thanks can you point me to some samples?

[Habitat43]

@arqteran I know you posted this a long time ago, about exporting VW FBX files into 3dsmax, any specific settings that you use when exporting the file? In VW you do the model by classes or layers? what's better for 3dsmax, layers or clases?  thanks!

[arqteran]

On 10/23/2020 at 11:51 PM, Habitat43 said:

@arqteran I know you posted this a long time ago, about exporting VW FBX files into 3dsmax, any specific settings that you use when exporting the file? In VW you do the model by classes or layers? what's better for 3dsmax, layers or clases?  thanks!

well I think the answer is yes use both classes and layers, I usually use layers for the project levels (stories) and clases for elements and materials... I redo the mapping and texturing in 3ds max though, because it has much better specific tools for that, it would be a dream to have a direct link to 3ds max...!!! pretty much everything regarding texturing and lighning is done in 3ds max with Vray or corona. just use the default settings and give priority to classes if you need to... hope it helps.

 

[zoomer]

Maybe the 3D Max Exchange with DWG is working with VW.

There is no material export but Max may keep its material

assignment though.

 

So you could export separate DWGs for each Layer while sharing

Classes for Material Assignments.