V-Ray for Softimage

Yep. You read right. Chaosgroup announces Vray for Softimage beta. You can sign up for the beta here.


Audi R8 Spec Commercial from LemonGood on Vimeo.

The V-Ray for Softimage Public Beta Program will run for a period of approximately 2 months, starting on September 28th.

Softimage supported features

• ICE support support - render geometry produced by the award-winning Softimage ICE system, including particles, strands, hair, ICE-managed color arithmetic, all fully animated.
• Animated parameters - V-Ray will efficiently render Softimage objects with animated parameters and an arbitrary number of keyframes. All geometry modifications and many color-oriented animatable parameters are supported.
• Strong render tree support - V-Ray supports dozens of the procedural shader node types for the Softimage render tree, and new ones are added on a regular basis and made available through service packs.
• Weightmaps - apply transformations to geometry or color attributes of a scene on a per-vertex basis with full support for Softimage weightmaps.
• V-Ray Sun and Sky - create realistic outdoor scenes with physically accurate lighting and atmosphere effects, while maintaining control over rendering times.

V-Ray supported features

Shading

• Support for efficient material layering.
• VRayCarPaintMtl.
• Support for PTex textures.
• V-RayToon shader.
• Support for dispersion in refractions for VRayMtl.

Lights

• Physically accurate lights.
• Efficient illumination from HDR environments.

Camera

• Lens distortion through Nuke displacement maps.
• Option to turn off camera motion blur.
• Shutter efficiency for motion blur.

Render output

• Support for additional render elements.
• Output of multi-channel scanline OpenEXR files with data-window.

Effects

• Depth of field with bokeh effects.
• Accurate motion blur.

Scene translator

• Support for .vrscene output for rendering with V-Ray Standalone.

Supported platforms

Softimage 7.0
Softimage 7.5
Softimage 2010
Softimage 2011
Softimage 2011 ASP
Softimage 2012
(64-bit supported on all platforms)

Building1 Closeup composite

A bit of remodelling to an old scene and using a new pass based image creation technique. This is a low res compositing test image.

A selection of passes below:

'Original render size:1920x1080 (render times for passes)

'Albedo
'wallclock 0:00:56.54 for rendering
'AO <- may try baking this with higher settings (using second unique UVs projection for animation)
'wallclock 0:07:09.58 for rendering
'FG
'wallclock 0:02:31.26 for computing finalgather points <- (will be pregenerated for animation)
'wallclock 0:04:08.25 for rendering
'metal
'wallclock 0:02:21.31 for rendering
'highlight
'0:03:27.49 for rendering
'Depth
'wallclock 0:00:28.69 for rendering
'background
'wallclock 0:00:16.28 for rendering
'white matte
'wallclock 0:00:37.99 for rendering
'glass <- The main bottleneck!
'wallclock 0:26:03.71 for rendering
'with bump res increased wallclock 0:50:34.96 for rendering (probably should lower)

The Bendy One

The Bendy One from Jason Wells on Vimeo.

This was a speed test using an old project and some newish techniques I've gained. It was composited in XSI using the FX tree. I used my RM_Architectural compound to generate the seperate diffuse (albedo), specular and reflective, etc passes via channels. I used fast radiosity technique to generate indirect illumination from a blurred HDR map (frame rendertime less than 20 secs). I baked an Ambient Occlusion pass as a texture using rendermap and reduced the render speed of each 1270x720 frame to 2 seconds. The longest part for rendering was the glossy floor reflection which I reduced by limiting the reflective area with a weight map.

I used a radial gradient in FX tree to create a vignetting effect and blurred some duplicates of the specular pass to get glows on the highlights. I'll try to do some tests with DOF and motion vector driven motion blur next.