Subburb...Fernando and I will be at SIGGRAPH, so look forward to meeting you. We'll be at the ChaosGroup booth which is booth num 3119 I believe.

I really like the solid rocks plugin, so it would certainly be a welcome addition to VfSU. Unlike the ChaosGroup, which hasn't really expressed much of an interest in changing their interface, that's probably the biggest request we get. Subsequently the next full version of VfSU/Rhino will have a tiered interface solution with a Basic UI, Intermediate UI, and an Expert UI (Expert being essentially exactly what we have now). The Basic and Intermediate UI will remove a lot of unnecessary parameters and offer some more user friendly ways to adjust settings than having to deal with numbers.

There will be some more resources available in the next full version to do something like Solid Rocks, specifically the ability to add custom UI. I'm not sure how much we'll be offering in terms of scripting support, but hopefully there will be something to offer as we currently don't have anything exposed scripting wise.

In regards to the changing the settings for high res, there isn't the need to double the LC subdivisions. The reason being is that LC is not really tied to resolution in the sense that each sample area will be the same percentage of the final image (assuming screen sample scale) and although that area will cover more pixels, it will not change in regards to the area of the scene that each sample is describing. Therefore, regardless of resolution, there will still be the same number of samples created, and each of those samples will get approximately the same number of subdivisions. When you begin to change the sample size to add more actual samples, then the LC result with the same number of subdivisions will be more noisy and require more subdivisions. I'm actually an advocate of using smaller sample sizes (I typically have mine at about 0.5%) since that allows the LC solution to capture more detail and make better use of adding additional subdivisions.

No worries Kwisten. I think people don't realize that software isn't the only side of our business, so once you realize how much those other parts actually contribute to ASGvis as a company it does make a little more sense. I know that you're waiting for more from VfSU, and we want to get to being as on par with VfMax as we can. We have the opportunity to do so with the current state of the V-Ray SDK and the new overhaul of the Core will only make it easier for us to add the features we need.

As to a V-Ray studio, that's something that's in the ChaosGroup's ballpark, not ours, and something that they really don't have too much of a interest in. Even if down the road, the different V-Ray plugins wind up relying on rendering through the V-Ray StandAlone (which is pretty much a commandline renderer at this point), it will be the responsibility of each of the plugins to generate the appropriate scene file and there really wouldn't be much of a chance to modify or adjust that scene before it would get rendering through the standalone.

I completely missed the scatter stuff

The main component to V-Ray scatter is getting V-Ray proxies in to VfSU, which is right at the top of the list for the next full version of VfSU. After that, the "scattering" is a matter of placing the objects on surfaces with a random rotation/scale transform. In that basic sense, this is something that I would like to have available natively in VfSU, but I will know more as we get int proxy development. As a note, V-Ray proxies will most likely be very tied into SU components, so any script that randomly places, rotates, scales a component will likely work well with proxies piggy backing on top of it.

@kwistenbiebel said:

By the way, Asgvis seems to become reseller of other products besides their own

We got a lot of requests from studios that use V-Ray on more than one platform that they would like to buy from one place for everything V-Ray as opposed to one place per V-Ray platform. That's a measure to accommodate them.

@unknownuser said:

as well as being a render studio (competing with their own customers?) ...

We were actually a rendering studio for longer than we've been developing software. While still a studio we brought in a programmer to help streamline some of our Max/V-Ray pipeline. We began getting involved with the ChaosGroup and moved on to developing V-Ray for Rhino and SU. From there things on the software side have grown so much, all the time the rendering studio still plugging away, producing top notch visualizations.

We don't really see it as competing with our own customers (V-Ray for Rhino/SU at least) since the main target of our visualization services are very high quality stills and animations. Although we do have some users of our software that do high end visualization, the majority of our users are designers who pair visualization with their design process. The imagery that our studio produces requires the focus, knowledge, and experience of a visualization professional, which is something that not every one is has the time, effort, or money to do on their own. Take a look at the Four Seasons or Silo Point projects in the Services gallery...are you going to hire a helicopter to fly over Baltimore's Inner Harbor? Our visualization studio will go to those lengths to get the shots. Hopefully that explains things a little more

@unknownuser said:

I find that a bit strange. It appears to me they don't really foresee a great future for their own products (vrayforRhino/Sketchup), betting on two horses like that...

Well, we really don't. We're trying to provide for our customers, whatever they need, whether its a seat of V-Ray (for whatever app you may be using) or a top quality animation. Besides, the more successful we are as a company, the more we can improve V-Ray for SU and V-Ray for Rhino

Controlling the softness of the shadows of the sun can be done through the Sun Size parameter. You'd get to that through your sky settings in the Environment rollout

I'm not really going to "weigh in" here as my opinion is obviously biased, but I'll just try to clear up some version/update questions that seam to be floating around.

Right now the development team has been completely rewriting the core of VfSU so that it will run on a Mac. There are a number of added benefits to this; some of which will be apparent now, some of which will be apparent later. In the short term, we'll be releasing the Mac version, along with a update for the windows side as well, in a few months time. The actual dates depend largely on how things work out during the testing period (which should be starting with a few weeks...I'll make an announcement here). Obviously if there's a lot of bugs/issues that pop up, we'll have to work those out before its officially released. As Thomas said, the Mac version and the update for the windows side of things will have minimal additional features. That being said, we have taken a closer look at parsing, so at this point that is looking better.

In regards to the long term picture of VfSU 2, that is too far off for me to give much specifics. I will say that there is a lot that is on the boards for getting attention during the vfSU2 development process. Among them are Proxies, significant UI changes, additional materials/textures, and a number of other smaller features. As we move on from working on the core to adding these features, we'll let you know more.

Upgrade/pricing wise, that $100 off coupon is only good for just a few more days, so if you're thinking about it, nows the time. For those of you that already have VfSU, the update corresponding with the Mac version will be free, but VfSU 2 will have an upgrade cost associated with it. That upgrade from VfSU 1 to VfSU 2 hasn't been finalized, but will be a significantly lower cost than the program out right.

Lastly, (and this is more on a personal note) I think that Modo is a great program and does a lot of things very well. From what I've seen of it, and the limited experience I have with it, I can tell you that it does amazing work and is a lot of fun to use. I'm personally one who is likes using tools "in addition to" rather than "in place of", and Modo is tool that I think makes a good addition to a number of workflows. I will say that I have yet to render in Modo

T-Splines is a great tool for combining Poly modeling and Nurbs Modeling workflows. In fact its somewhat akin to a Nurbs based solution for generating subdivision surfaces. The meshes that to converts to T-Splines are meant to be SubD-style meshes as opposed to just any old mesh, but it does convert most meshes very well into T-splines objects. Using T-Splines with regular Nurbs is really easy as well, since a nurbs surface converts directly to T-Splines and T-Splines will create Nurbs surfaces (poly surfaces mostly). That's not to say that a nurbs surface going in will end up with the same surface topology after working/modifying it as a T-Splines object but there won't really be any loss of information in the conversion.

T-Splines is just a Rhino/Maya plugin, so just be aware of that. I don't believe that there are any other platforms that are under development.

CurryPork,

The manual has a ton of information, so that should really be a central resource for you. I'm not sure what you're looking for in regards to tutorials, but the manual covers just about everything from right from the start. There's also a Tips and Tricks section in our forum (http://forum.asgvis.com/index.php?board=15.0) that is certainly worth taking a look at. A number of users have posted specific tutorials on things that they've found useful, so that's a good resource for some pretty specialized things. Also, if you're willing to look at V-Ray tutorials that are made for other host applications (such as Rhino and Max), then you'll be able to find loads more tutorials on a number of different topics. The concepts and techniques are largely the same, and the interface is laided out very similarly with the same labels.

I think there are more materials out there for vfsu than you're giving credit for. It may not be as "high profile" as the VRay-Materials.de site, but there are a number of other material resources that are out there. One thing to remember is that textures are the main basis for most materials, so if you can get your hands on the textures used for a material, then you've got 95% of what makes it up. Those textures can be just out there, part of VfMax materials, or even part of materials for other render engines. As long as they've got the images, then you've got a material. Also, most of the sites, including ours, is based on users sharing materials that they've created. The more you guys share, the better online material libraries will get. The material downloads section isn't up on the website yet, but it should be up in a little while and should make sharing and finding materials much easier.

http://forum.asgvis.com/index.php?topic=5916.0
http://www.3dtraining.ch/index.php/en/page-de-telechargements?func=select&id=11
http://material-db.com/#show:materials

We did write a converter for VfMax materials, but there were a number of issues with it. I talked a little bit about what some of the issues are and what some of the barriers are with doing another one in the thread below...
http://forum.asgvis.com/index.php?topic=5862.msg31910#msg31910

Two questions...first, are the spawners from the same version as VfSU that you're using, or were they installed from a previous version? Unless the spawners are from the same version as VfSU there's a strong chance that this is at the heart of the issue. There isn't a way to check the version of the spawners at the moment, so you'll have to reinstall them from the 1.05.30 installer.

Second, have you set up asset collection correctly? The spawners need access to all the images that you're using in your scene, so they need to get distributed one way or another. By default its setup to send everything to a node, but there's also the option to read from shared folder. If you've changed that or disabled asset collection altogether, that may be at the heart of the issue.

We are aware that activation emails aren't getting sent out and are looking for the cause of the issue as we speak.

There are still a number of things that have yet to be added to the new site. We're trying to add these and work out the issues and add content as quickly as we can. All we ask is for a little patience. In the meantime if there's other things please let us know and we'll do our bet to point you to a solution.

Sorry for the website. We know about the issues and are working them out as quickly as we can.

The manual has not been updated for the most recent versions of VfSU and the options that it is referring to are the ones related to making linked materials. As of VfSU SR1, all of the materials are automatically linked, so there isn't a need to set this up as before. Now any modifications that you do to a SU material are echoed in V-Ray, and any modifications done in V-Ray that SU can understand are echoed to SU as well.

Grouping does play an important role in VfSU knowing which faces to displace. The reason for this is that in order to keep the displaced mesh all continuous, V-Ray needs to know where those edges are and adjust the normal when approaching an edge between two displaced faces. Since the object was grouped correctly before you put the white band in there, adding it most likely muffed up the grouping in some way. One you regroup, then everything gets sorted out and it works.

The option that I was describing above is referred to as Keep Continuity. I don't recommend turning it off, but here's a small example of what it does...from Spot3d.com

http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/150R1/examples_displacement.htm#example5

I just happened to be sticking my head in over here, so I figured I'd answer the Adaptive Amount 0.85 question. There are two main techniques that V-Ray uses to speed up a rendering; Early Termination and Importance sampling. I won't discuss the first one (that's another post), but the second one is basically the idea that values that have more potential to affect the scene should be sampled more accurately. In layman's terms, brighter areas get sampled more than darker areas do. The Adaptive Amount setting controls how much of a fall off happens between sampling the brighter areas and darker areas. We want some sort of fall off as that will make the rendering quicker, but with too much of a fall off darker areas my be undersampled leading to splotchiness and other issues.

The "goldilocks" number for this setting is 0.85. Any higher (>.85) and the sampling can be compromised. Any lower (<.85) and the rendering will likely be slower without much visual difference. Note that this is more of an issue when working with Irradiance Mapping for primary bounces. If you happen to be using DMC, they you can increase this a little higher than .85 (but still not to 1) without as much of a chance for artifacts.