vrayC4D material workflow?

[Ernest Burden III]

I was wondering how any of you that are using vrayC4D are handling the material conversion issue. For those that don't, the plugin as it is now requires that all materials be converted to vray mats. This is done by a utility, but the conversion is not perfect and it is one-way, meaning all your C4D mats are replaced by the vray mats. Once you've done this, only vray can render the file. If you are using Finalrender2 or Maxwell or Fry, you get a conversion upon render, so its not destructive--you can still render with the built-in engine. Only vray makes you choose.

 

This has slowed down my adopting vray. How are others handling the materials conversion workflow?

[STRAT]

so far i've converted over to vray materials, but saved an AR copy of them too incase i need to revert back.

[Ernest Burden III]

so far i've converted over to vray materials, but saved an AR copy of them too incase i need to revert back.

 

Are you doing this at various stages in the image's development? I test render somewhat frequently while working a project. I'm not happy about locking myself into a vray track, but if its always C4D's AR, I'm not really seeing how materials will play as I build the scene.

[STRAT]

why not stick to vray my friend?

 

we've decided to do the vray track. the only AR stuff we're doing now are older jobs we havent got time to convert.

[Ernest Burden III]

why not stick to vray my friend?

 

I guess I should, except that blocks out Fry, which I want to get some attention, too. Without vray, I can keep the engine options open.

 

I recently tried to go to vray on a complex interior animation right at the last minute. Guess what? It turned into a disaster. Who could have predicted that?

 

I do re-use my materials a lot. There just aren't all that many things you need--a few glass, a few shiny and brushed metal, some stone. So I could build on vray mats once I get base versions of those that I'm happy with.

[STRAT]

 

I recently tried to go to vray on a complex interior animation right at the last minute. Guess what? It turned into a disaster. Who could have predicted that?

 

 

what happened mate?

 

 

are you an active member on the VRAYforC4D.com forums?

[Ernest Burden III]

what happened mate?

 

 

are you an active member on the VRAYforC4D.com forums?

 

I am on that forum...active?

 

What happened is I learned that the material conversion is not perfect for any material that is shiny or transparent. I had a model with a huge amount of those materials--glass for different types of glazing, stair and balcony uprights, bottles in several bars, stones, wood floors (built from procedurals in C4D) etc. There was no way to first learn how to re-work the mats (no-one on the vrayC4D forum could even explain the conversion process very well) and then to actually do the re-work in the time I had. I had intended to render with FR2 (the file was set up with all the right FR2 tags + C4D tags) but that was going too slowly. There aren't reliable render farms for FR2/C4D, so it would have to run on my machines. That left AR, which was kicking amazingly good GI framerates vs both vray and FR2. I was able to use RenderCore to handle some of the shots...but that sample accumulation bug came back. The shots were all pretty short (100 - 250 frames) but the times ballooned after a few frames. The answer was baking the large surfaces, which takes a day or more to do. In the end, though, it produces super-quick rendertimes. But the AR time bug cost me a lot in the farm fees, and I STILL had to put in the time to bake stuff.

 

In fact, the files had two versions--morning light and afternoon light, so I had to do the baking twice.

 

I think if I had invested the same day or two I spent baking the files, I could have re-built my vray mats. But, like with FR2, I would only have had my machine to render on.

 

Which reminds me of another reason I'm not eager to go all-vray-mat: I work on any one of three machines (old workstation, new workstation, laptop). Vray is only on the new workstation, so I would not be able to test materials on the other computers if that was where I was working on my C4D files.

[Ernest Burden III]

I posted this on the vray/C4D forum. Its a suggestion of how to add vray mats but keep the ability to render with AR or other engines:

 

I have a few suggestions on how to improve [the material converter].

 

The first is to make a change that will allow a user to still use C4D mats with the AR engine, or FryRender or Maxwell or Finalrender2 and still provide all the vray mats.

 

This is something I came up with to work back and forth with AR and FR2 mats, and it works with vray, too.

 

When the converter creates a vray mat for each material and the replaces the mats, it means we get a vray-only file. But if the converter adds the vray mats, we get both. What you do is copy the AR material tag one place to its right and check 'mix textures' in the new tag. The vray mat is placed in the right-hand one. When you render with AR, it ignores the vray (or FR2 or whatever) mat completely and only renders the regular C4D one. When you switch on vray, it only renders the vray mat and ignores the AR one. Its the best of both, and you keep your options open while you're building your model.

 

In this example I rendered the left with AR, then the right with vray. Easy.

 

 

I have not yet tested how this works when we have selection tags in place. that might make this technique not work, we'll see. But for now, it's worth looking at adding. Some users might want it as an option, meaning they may like the way it works now. I don't, and this helps. I can certainly do this manually, but when a file has hundreds of objects, its becomes a lot of work.

[Ernest Burden III]

Further testing reveals that this technique does not work when your object has selection sets assigned to the mats. It works (meaning the mixed tags keeping both engines working with their own mats) with AR, but not vray. Which means that objects would have to be split by materials first.