Go Forth and V-Ray: Maya 2013 Versions are on Chaos Group Site

All the Mac/Linux/Windows versions of V-Ray 2.3 are on the Chaos Group support server if you’ve been waiting on this to move to Maya 2013.

If you’re running my Automator action for nightly unrar and installs, open the workflow file and change 2012 to 2013 in the file path and you’re good to go.

Make V-Ray Proxy Automator Service Updated

I made this Automator service a while ago for making V-Ray Proxies and I added a prompt for the face count.

Grab the service here. Should work in OS X 10.6 and above.

V-Ray Tuner 2.6.2 Posted for Download

I think a lot of people will like the new render utility preview added in V-Ray Tuner 2.6.2:

When you build complex shaders, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell what a stage looks like by looking at the end result, so that’s why I made the render utility preview. I recommend using the non-OpenCL RT for this feature since RT GPU has very limited support for shader network types. The facing ratio used above is one that doesn’t work in OpenCL mode.

The render utility preview works with pretty much anything you throw at it (utility or procedural texture) if V-Ray RT supports it. It just maps the utility to a surface shader, which has no shading properties so it shows you just what the utility looks like, unshaded. As usual, all temporary surface shaders, render layers and objects are removed on hitting the Cleanup Material Elements button. This won’t make garbage in your scene that you have to manually remove.

Other changes in 2.6.2:

• Material Worker Layer no longer makes a folder in your temp images when you hit IPR Render button (use the palette IPR button). If you use the render view’s IPR button, folders will still be made
• When you remove the Material Worker Layer, it puts the camera position back to where it was before you started tweaking the material
• Added Car Paint material support to Material Worker Layer
• Added Distributed Render Settings to Utilities menu for quick toggling of DR slaves

Change V-Ray Distributed Rendering Servers Without Opening Maya

After manually switching the V-Ray for Maya distributed rendering settings a bunch, I found out that these settings are stored in plain text files that can be changed separately. On OS X, there are two files. The first:

~/Library/Preferences/Autodesk/maya/server_list.tmp

That has the slave addresses (10.0.1.x, for example). I’m not sure where it is stored in Windows or Linux but look in the user level maya folder and it should be there. And the second file sets the slave status (Enabled/Disabled):

~/Library/Preferences/Autodesk/maya/server_status.tmp

All you do is toggle the Disabled/Enabled text for the corresponding IP address:

And you’ve just set the slaves without opening Maya.

Material Worker Layer Updated in V-Ray Tuner 2.6.1

Maya’s material previews are pretty much useless. V-Ray’s are single-threaded so they are brutally slow – how many times have you tweaked an SSS shader and waited 10 seconds for an update that doesn’t really help? This is why I designed the Material Worker Layer in V-Ray Tuner 2.6 – to give you something actually helpful to look at when previewing materials. This would ostensibly let you turn off the preview swatch rendering and never waste time again:

I just updated this feature to give the preview shapes better lighting and I have more more preview shapes available for your test material:

I also put a Distributed Rendering (DR) checkbox in the place of the “World Scale for Light Cache” (WS) toggle. I think there are a lot more people who are going to want to toggle that frequently than there are people who want to toggle WS. It works great - no more opening the Settings render panel for enabling DR, something I’m using more frequently now that my laptop is beastly. Here’s the V-Ray Tuner download link.

Enabling V-Ray Distributed Rendering for Maya Command Line Renders

Someone asked how to do this on CGSociety and it’s pretty simple: Either save the Maya file with the Use distributed rendering set to on or add this preRender command to your command line render and it will activate DR even if your file doesn’t have it enabled:

Render -r vray -preRender "setAttr \"vraySettings.sys_distributed_rendering_on\" 1;" /Users/beige/Desktop/test.ma

V-Ray Tuner 2.6 - Two New Features: Tiled Rendering and Material Worker Layer

Today I’m releasing a new version of V-Ray Tuner and it has a few things that should appeal to a lot of people:

Material Worker Layer

This script creates a temporary render layer with the selected V-Ray material mapped to a 1-metre sphere so you can tweak it with a basic lighting guide while evaluating it with V-Ray RT. Hit the Cleanup Elements button and the render layer and temp objects are gone:

Yes, I realize I set the IOR below 1, which is stupid but it was just to show the point of the worker layer. I will make the lighting a little more sophisticated in the next release and add options for object type and size.

Tiled Command Line Rendering

I’ve seen a few people ask for this for times when they have to render giant posters which cause memory problems. So I implemented a tiled rendering batch script that will use the command line, so you’re using as little memory as possible. It has options for two, four or nine tiles:

As you can see from the video, Photoshop’s “Load Files into Stack” script works perfectly to assemble the images. Tip: when rendering very large scenes, you should generally use Brute Force (Primary GI) and Light Cache (Secondary GI) to reduce memory usage versus Irradiance Maps.

Other small tweaks:

Added Linux support for sleep after render and Optimize button no longer changes dynamic mesh setting to static. V-Ray 2 fixed the problem with slower dynamic mesh rendering. Here’s the download link again. Enjoy and, if you find V-Ray Tuner useful and you’re looking for some Maya tips, maybe considering picking up my 101 Autodesk® Maya® Tips ebook that is getting very good reviews. This ends the mom-like guilt portion of my post.

Studio Photography Techniques in Rendering: Gobos and Reflectors

This post has been on the back burner – my desktop – for a while, so it is with great pride I hit publish on this bad boy. The trick to overcoming procrastination: pretend someone’s telling you to slack off and suddenly work becomes that much more appealing! Anyway, on to the post. When doing 3D, in any renderer, I use very traditional studio photography techniques to create appealing lighting and most of this centres around reflector cards (things that bounce light) and gobos (things that block light). 3D renderings are often dull due to uncreative lighting, not poor modelling and novice to intermediate level 3D artists struggle with this the most since it involves thinking like a photographer.

The basic reasoning behind using a reflector card is that it gives more interesting reflections and bounces light back on objects without creating additional lights, which some people like to use but I find unneeded and just adds to render times. I’ve art directed a lot of product photo shoots and 60% of the time at a shoot is just watching the photographer move white cards and gobos to create the most interesting reflections and refractions. Some examples:

Getting that balance of stark light falloff and subtle gradations is done with a masterful handling of reflectors and gobos. In my still renders, these are key to making the objects look interesting and appealing. This can scene is a pretty simple anisotropic reflection with lots of controlled reflections and lights:

The lighting and reflectors (click for high res):

Even for scenes that don’t need that kind of dramatic product delineation, mixed-colour reflectors create the illusion of environment and add needed variation to surfaces. The renders below shows the roof without any reflectors and the bottom with some hidden reflectors:

That’s using the same lighting – only the reflectors have changed. It’s a huge difference and it’s very easy to do. Make a plane with a diffuse Ward Lambert material (almost pure white, black or coloured) place it so that light is bouncing how you want it relative to the camera (incident rays) and turn off primary visibility and Casts/Receives Shadows in the Render flags of the shape node for the plane:

That way, the reflectors don’t create shadows and they don’t appear in the renders. They will still affects ambient occlusion (V-Ray Dirt ExtraTex passes) though, so you’ll need to turn that off for AO passes with exclusion sets. After that, you’re good. Experiment with coloured reflectors – often these will add interesting elements to your reflections, like the red touches on the conveyor belt with the woman’s shoe here:

That’s a concept/shoot/rendering that I art directed and planned for enRoute magazine. The photography is by Jaime Leblanc.

If you’re interested in learning more studio photography techniques that will help improve your lighting and rendering, the book Light: Science & Magic is excellent.

Using Artisan Painting to Live-Blend Materials in Maya

After using procedural texture workflows for a while, you get used to having access to individual components of a shader and, if you’ve ever used something like UDK where vertex weights can be used for rapidly mixing shader components, going back to a big, static, memory-hog texture for something like terrain is just not appealing. So if you’re looking for way to get the blending benefits of a paint workflow with the control of multiple layers with individual UVs, there is a simple way to do it. Create a Blend Colors utility and plug your two textures into the two slots of the Blend Colors and plug that into a Maya Phong, Lambert or Blinn material (the V-Ray or mental ray shaders come later) so you can see a good preview of the material. Then duplicate your object and assign a new dummy material that will be your paint surface. Once you assign a 3D Paint Tool texture, you can use that resulting file as the input for your blend (you only need to plug in the red, green or blue channel of the texture to the blend slot since it needs a luminance value, not an RGB texture):

The benefit of this slightly odd workflow is that you can get a realtime preview of the blending and change UV parameters for each material. If you lock the layer that the paint object is on and don’t offset the duplicate, it makes it more intuitive without eyeballing two different objects. Here’s an example of that with a slightly more complex shader network, showing that you can blend the bumps (or anything else) with that Paint Tool file:

At that stage, it’s a bit overkill for previewing though. Once you have a good idea of the blend, just plug the textures into V-Ray materials and then plug those into a V-Ray Blend Material, using the 3D Paint Tool texture as the blend amount. Make sure you have Save Texture On Stroke set for this since V-Ray relies on the disk file, not just what’s in memory. If you were really adventurous, you could paint only on the R, G, and B channels and use those separately as inputs for different blends or Fresnel amount, etc, much like a vertex painting operation in UDK (I made a sample file with this setup if you want it). If you want to keep your preview material on your object but render the V-Ray Blend material, that’s easily done. Just link up your two materials:

And have Maya toggle the V-Ray shader at render time using this method. That way, you get the best of both worlds: flexible materials, good visualization, and a proper V-Ray mat for renders.

If you would rather not worry about UVs and things like that, you can always use a Ptex texture painted in Mudbox or 3D-Coat and plug it into the blend slot of a V-Ray Blend Material. But that doesn’t give you a real-time preview like the method above does (at least not yet in Maya 2012 - hopefully we’ll see this in the future). This is really just a technique for preserving UV materials as layers and quickly visualizing things all in Maya.

V-Ray Tuner 2.5 Posted for Download

Grab it from the usual location on Creative Crash.

Changelog:

• Made command line render scripts Linux compatible, with exception of those with sleep commands. Tested in CentOS 5.6
• Per-light render script updated to work with spotlights and directional lights.
• Added a Make Reflector Card script to utilities menu. Select object and run script to make a plane that is aimed at the selected object. The plane has primary vis and shadows off for use with creating reflections. Still affects occlusion though, so you’ll need to turn that off for AO passes.
• Added a Toggle Env Texture script to utilities.
• Per-light render script updated to work with spotlights and directional lights.
• Added a Toggle Env Texture script to utilities.
• Some additional options in Utilities menu for per-light render workflows
• Fixed per-light rendering to recognize enabled flag turned off for V-Ray lights so it doesn’t just render a blank image

next »