It would be great if we could just have unified log thats in max rather than having a comand prompt window pop up. The two problems I am having with this is.
As you are working you end up with many command prompts open which gets confusing. Also it seems to close The VFB when you close the command prompt and I cant see a way to bring it back.
I dont know if this is a windows 10 thing but when tryin to resize the command prompt window to read the msgs it makes all the text disapear.
Would be great if it just used the same VFB over rather than open a new one everytime.
Right now we are rendering completely outside of 3ds Max. The command prompt you see, and the VFB are both related to running VRAY.EXE, the stand-alone version of V-Ray, using a vrscene containing a backed version of the Max scene, and external files containing all particles. You could even close Max after export, and the rendering would continue and finish. I see this as a benefit since the rendering does not block the main thread of 3ds Max - you can start rendering, and go back to the scene to work on it, or even open another scene and work on it…
The Maya integration of KVRY is more like what you described, the export is performed via callbacks and the output ends up in the Maya VFB. But it actually blocks the main thread, so while the frame is rendering, you cannot do anything else in Maya.
We would like to try to make the 3ds Max implementation behave more like the Maya one, but the VRay of Max is much more married to 3ds Max than the Maya one, and we are not sure if we can get the same level of integration there. It is on our list to try, but at this point the whole project is a Proof Of Concept that it can be done. So the workflows are a bit … preliminary.
I get the same issue with the log disappearing when resizing the command window, I think it is a Windows 10 problem. But that log is VRay’s own, so you can ask Chaos Group if you want.
since this a workflow thread I figured I would just tag on here.
The layout of the UI is intuitive and linear, almost better than, cough, cough, Krakatoa’s massive (yet necessary) UI.
The Cmd’s can get excessive, it is not something that really bothers me as since I know what it is doing. It is actually kinda of nice as you can compare VFB’s
As a proof of concept I think you guys pretty much nailed a solid useful tool. I don’t see anything I would impress to improve upon apart from a few minor additions.
You know me, and I am going to ask, I would like to see a view lock in the interface (or at a minimum tell me which view is going off to render), I found myself sending off multiple times, the wrong viewport. This would help with wasted cycles. I know you can lock it from the internal VFB, there should just be a more intuitive way to do it IHMO.
The trouble is that the 3ds Max Viewport Lock exposure is a mess as it is, and if I try to mess with it, who knows what will happen. I tried that in the Extended VFB of KMX itself, and it barely worked.
The vrscene exporter takes whatever Max is set to render. If you have a viewport locked and activate another, exporting with KVRY will render the locked one, not the active one, so at least that behaves predictably.
