Tom Bussey

Bit late to this but I believe Cryptomatte needs to be saved in a 32bit multichannel EXR to work, you do that through the Vray raw image output path, If you want to save disk space you can compress the other channel to 16bit with this

just saw this was posted on Friday... so a tad late!

Maybe the easiest thing would be to save your render settings all except elements, rest by switching to arnold and back to Vray, then re-load your settings and add the lightmix element back in, it should then have the elements tab in the default state + your lightmix element.

assuming 3dsMax: can you not just make a spline of known length, and divide by known number (Divide in editable spline)?

That's the Maps rollout you're looking in, not the materials one. Which parameters are you having trouble adjusting?

Interesting methodology to get around materials and instances being split. I used containers a bit on project recently, no multiple instances in the destination file but the aim was to have parity over a number of different scenes. It broke down a little in the heat of the rush to deadline but largely worked well to keep things light and organised, the problem I had was the load/unload times as my SSD was a little slow. With the NVMe I have now it might be better. One thing we used to do when I did a lot of site plans like that was use Vray proxies with materials IDs, one for brick one for roof tile etc etc. Then in your destination scene you turn off 'Propagate materials to instances' and assign a multi-sub material with the correct combination of materials to each one. This worked well when we had say 10 housetypes and 5 material combinations. Edit: I see that was said already 10 years ago by Scott!

What render engine are you using? What your describing is a realistic effect, you may be able to bring it in to acceptable levels by changing your material properties before you go down the brute force method of stopping it completely.

Probablly depends what processes you're planning to send to your farm and whether they're multithreaded. Vray and Corona tend to utilise multithreading so higher core count is probably best, but expenct there's probably diminishing returns once you start getting to the very high end processors. If it's Vray or Corona jobs you're sending then I think both have benchmark tables that you should be able to compare processors on. Just work out the cost of each node per benchmark unit and there's your value system.

Echoing VelvetElvis' words, I feel you're in a pretty strong place, and it's hard to pick fault with your images. Maybe if you're feeling a bit uninspired start playing around with fog/atmospherics/different weather conditions. To do this in 3D is tough on your computer (but fun) but a Z-depth, some clouds from photobash and some noise in post can go a long way. Do you your post in 8 bit, 16bit or 32bit mode in photoshop? Using 32bit back-to-beauty approach got me excited for a while, allowing you to comp in photos to reflections/refractions correctly and giving a greater control over materials in post, although it has its draw-backs. A similar thing can be done in Corona or Vray frame buffer I believe. Also it's a bit emperor's new clothes but ACES colour-managed workflow might get you pleasing results if your renderer can do it. I feel like some of the images would benefit from having more people and stories about their interactions with the architecture, although that's not the case for every image, sometimes a building just looks best on its own.

I have to admit, I think you're right. I tried RDP from another PC on the network and while it was better than via VPN it still wasn't quite up to the level of direct control, so the PC is coming home with me. It should be ok as since last time I had it here I've had a much quieter CPU cooler fitted, so it's actually pretty unobtrusive, even when rendering. I also have my own NAS now which should be big enough for saving frames to.

Are they animated?

Our network isn't all that, probably the bare minimum 1Gb network, but hopefully enough for the graphical bandwidth. One downside of working in an Architects office is that Revit is a fair bit less intensive on moving data around so my lamentations about network speeds tend to fall on deaf ears. 10Gb network sounds like the dream.

Thanks, yes I thought it had been discussed recently, but couldn't find the thread. I think you're probably right, VPN seems a bit of a bottleneck which is probably why Parsec felt a bit snappier than my VPN/RSP connection. I actually just set up my asset library to sync with my home NAS (QNAS/QSync), so a setup like yours could work to an extent. The issues I found when doing this before was a) offloading/backing up image sequences/Max files when my local storage started filling up - very slow over the VPN to company server, and b) I have to work in my lounge so having a huge tower whirling away in the corner was not great when trying to unwind in the evening. It's obviously the best in terms of graphical performance though. Edit: I guess my situation's a little bit unique in that I'm looking for a LAN solution. That feels like it's more likely to get good results than one over the internet. In fact I just need to go in and try RDP from another computer on the network as in theiry that'll be the same.

Another winter - another lockdown means that I'm going back to work from home for what will probably be a couple of months. Here in Wales we can actually get fined for going to work as employees so no matter your views on the transmisability of Coronavirus that's probvably a decent reason. Anyway, I'm in the fortunate (depending on your viewpoint) situation of living right next door to my work, so I should be sorting out a direct connection to the work LAN in the coming weeks. One of my biggest frustrations over the recent months has been trying to use a remote connection over VPN. Our official solution is LogMeIn client, but I find that horribly laggy. VPN & RDP is slightly better, but the responsiveness is still not all there and occasionally it just craps out, so productivity goes down and stress levels go up. I'm hoping that the LAN connection sorts things out to a large extent, but beyond that I'm looking for other suggestions for remote desktop solutions. Windows RDP VNC Parsec (seems to be aimed at gamers, just tried it out and lag seems better than windows remote/VPN even over the internet) Moonlight (Nvidea tech, sounds like it can utilise LAN) I have a Quadro P4000 GPU, apparently this can be used to power windows RDP, but I can't find anything about it in settings, not sure if it just does it by default.

I work 'in house' at an architect where Revit is the mainstay, so I've thought about this a lot. If you can get hold of a copy of Revit and learn how to use VG and display filters it'll make things less painful by cleaning up before import. I know it feels more intuitive to do it with the tool you know but you really don't have to go deep in to Revit to clean up before import. Basically creating an new 3D view and hiding all the categories you can, and beyond that filtering out families from the view by type name or family name. I think you can even right click and hide by category or family too. This will mean you're not importing geo you don't need which, because it's single threaded, can be a slow process, as I'm sure you know. It's slightly easier for me to do because I can create this view in the architects model and it will persist between design iterations, but you can save this view to a template and load it in to another copy of the file when the architect send that across. If I know the design is likely to change soon I'll sometimes use Revit links, which is basically an xref to the 3D view. If you update the link it'll keep your material assignments and modifiers which is a life saver. Obviously if you've used an effort poly and the underlying geo changed it's going to go screwy, I don't tend to mess with the Revit geo where possible for this reason, and it's usually messy anyway with loads of floating verts, so I do things like chamfers and profiles with materials where possible if they're not already modeled. The caveat is I'm always linking from the same file, so I don't know how well it would work with a completely new file, but so long as it's the same on the architects end and you've used your VG template it should work in theory. If I don't link and just import, I have combined by material before, but material are often the last thing the architects going to give much attention to, and it's not always easy to do in Revit in fairness, so you'll get the window reveals merged with the floor and plasterboard for example, or 3 objects called 'glass'. Therefore I have imported without combining recently. It takes a while but shouldn't be too bad if your Revit view is stripped right back. You'll still be looking at 20k+ objects for a normal tower block. The big advantage of doing it this way is that any Revit family with the same parameters (so windows the same size for example) will be instanced, so modifications are going to faster (this doesn't apply with Revit link without combining). I have the Autodesk bundle that's Revit, Max and Autocad, if you're in a studio maybe you could get one Revit licence just for cleaning up the incoming models. tl;dr what James said basically.