#v-ray tuner

[polygonspixelsandpaint]

V-Ray Tuner 4 Beta for V-Ray 3.0 – Come and Get It

UPDATE: V-Ray Tuner 4.0 released. Blog post here.

After returning from a very good SIGGRAPH, I've found some time to put up the latest version of V-Ray Tuner that has been cooking for the last number of months. I have been beta testing V-Ray 3.0 and I've added a lot of features that should cover the 3.0 user well from the beta to the release versions and beyond.

Warning: V-Ray 3.6 was the last version to support versions of V-Ray 2.x so it's possible that you can get errors if you use it with version 2.4. Some of the features use things like V-Ray's query options that are 3.0 only:

So, here are some of the additions to V-Ray Tuner 4 that I think will be well liked by V-Ray 3.0 beta and release users:

Use Environment Volume toggle added to new row of checkbox toggles to enable/disable environment fog. Great for speeding up your scene/material building and draft rendering since you don't always want fog slowing you down.

Use Embree toggle added to new row of checkbox toggles. Embree is Intel's CPU ray tracing optimization kernel that is used in V-Ray 3.0 (and RenderMan 19). If you have an Intel-based CPU, regardless of host OS, it should always be on to get the fastest render times.

Optimize script enables Embree if V-Ray version is 3 or above.

Transfer Missing Assets for DR toggle added to new row of checkbox toggles. This is the awesome new V-Ray 3.0 feature that does texture transfers in the background between Mac OS, Windows and Linux without having to use SAMBA and URL translation type fixes.

Use Local Machine for DR toggle added to new row of checkbox toggles. Good if you're using a laptop with faster machines as your slave workhorses.

Use Cached Assets toggle added to new row of checkbox toggles. Use this if you use distributed rendering since it will save uploading assets again. I've tested it extensively and the caching is now bulletproof at detecting asset changes.

See all those new things above in action here:

Another cool feature that I think will save people a lot of time:

Added V-Ray Tuner Presets manager for render settings in the Render menu. This is a nice way to create render presets that don't affect EVERYTHING like Maya's render presets do. This only affects the toggles you see represented in the V-Ray Tuner interface, so you can use a universal "Draft" setting for different resolution documents and click the load for final render settings that you prefer and only have the relevant quality features changed:

Toggle Object Sub-texture as Diffuse script now supports all material types.

Organized Materials menu into submenus for clearer outline of features and to take up less space.

Light Cache Prefilter Samples added to sliders.

Added a couple sliders to new Global Material/Light Tweaks section to do a single change to all reflection subdivs and light subdivs for quick switches from draft to final settings:

Added CUDA option to RT menu.

Added RT max noise slider to V-Ray RT sliders.

Wrap in VRayMtlWrapper added to Materials menu. Good for making mats that need to be matte bases. Select your mesh and then run the script.

Added prompt to LWFMe to see if you will manually linearize your textures and swatches. If you pick Yes, it does everything except enable "Linear Workflow" which is the dumb way to do automatic linear worklows and isn't recommended for use with V-Ray anyway. Basically, always click Yes and manually linearize your nodes unless you are using newer Maya versions with automatic colour management (2015 extension and later). I'll eventually remove the LWF setting altogether in the V-Ray Tuner UI but it's good to see that it's always off while you work.

Small fix to deGamma script to work with V-Ray mat display in viewport 2.

Three point lighter script added to Utils menu. Just adds three V-Ray Rect Lights to your scene around the object selected so you can get a basic three-point light setup. Groups the lights so you can scale and move them easily.

Anyway, enjoy and I'll post the final on Creative Crash once V-Ray 3.0 is released.

[polygonspixelsandpaint]

A Note About Setting Optimal V-Ray Settings for Distributed Rendering

It's possible if you're a V-Ray user that you're wasting time when doing distributed rendering with V-Ray light caches. A while ago, I added a modification to V-Ray Tuner that prompts you if you hit the Optimize button when using distributed rendering is enabled. It will ask for the max threads of the machine with the most threads. While the final render will always use the right amount of threads for your slave, the light cache passes should be set to the max thread count for all machines. So if you have three machines in your DR list with the following configs: machine 1: 6 cores/12threads machine 2: 16 cores/32 threads machine 3: 8 cores/16 threads You should set the light cache passes to 32. Or just enter 32 in the Optimize prompt in V-Ray Tuner. This won't cause issues for your machines with fewer cores/threads. If you aren't using DR, it will set the LC passes and render settings to use the max threads for your host machine, without a prompt. Some people may be avoiding the Optimize button because they don't want it screwing with your setup or scene but it just does this minimal setup. I also hate scripts that do mystical magic to your stuff to make it faster, leaving you to guess what it's modified. Any feature in V-Ray Tuner that deals with quality will always be very clear about what it is changing so there are no surprises. Stay tuned to read about V-Ray Tuner 4 features. I have added a bunch of things like a Distributed Render slave manager that should save people plenty of time when dealing with networked nodes.