V-Ray - Value Your Time

V-Ray - Value Your Time
V-Ray - Value Your Time
Anonim

The art of showing goods with your face has been appreciated, probably, since the very beginning of the slightest noticeable competition. If two sellers have the same product in general, then the success of the trade will not least depend on the seller's ability to look into the soul of the buyer, on the understanding of what is important for the buyer and what is not. In architecture, the fate of a project often depends not on those people who subsequently buy apartments or retail space, but on who agrees to pay for the construction - on the customer.

Today, when conducting a presentation of a project for a customer, it is already not enough to skillfully make drawings. Moreover, if the customer, as often happens, is not trained to read drawings, then they completely fade into the background: what is the use of drawings if a person simply does not understand why he should risk his money? For this reason, a good sketch can be much more powerful. Visualization tools for future architectural structures are developing so rapidly that they "tell" the customer about the project in a familiar language. And here all means are good: sketches, mock-ups and, of course, three-dimensional graphics.

All these methods are somehow idealized and simplified. However, perhaps it is three-dimensional graphics that are capable of simultaneously conveying both the volume and the environment of the presentation object most realistic, especially if an animated visualization is created - a kind of video tour. In Russia, three-dimensional architectural visualization began to be used somewhere in the late 90s. Then it seemed exotic, and due to the lack of financial resources and the poverty of computer equipment, the final work was mediocre by modern standards. However, by about 2003, architectural visualization had become an almost indispensable element in projects. As the demand for architectural visualization grew, so the demand for working tools for it grew.

There are specialized tools (for example, AutoCAD Revit Architecture) that allow you to create architectural visualization in addition to everything else related to design. There are universal 3D modeling tools that are much richer in their capabilities precisely because they are not tied to architectural or any other specifics. Universal architectural visualization tools are more interesting because they are more flexible, even if this comes at the cost of more complex tools. This complexity is not so important for a professional, if we keep in mind our main task - to make the most positive impression on the customer.

The creation of the three-dimensional model itself, which could impress the viewer from the nineties by the mere fact that it is made, in architectural visualization is only part of the work (perhaps even a smaller part). The trump card of our days is realism, reliable transfer of materials and all the nuances of lighting. Schematic "cartoon" houses and triangular Christmas trees today you will not get through.

Rendering is responsible for making everything "like for real" - a software module or a separate program that turns a three-dimensional scene, sketched by a designer, into the very image on a computer screen that we can see. Of course, how natural the picture will turn out depends both on the skill of the master and on the further post-processing of the image or video, but the basis is still the choice of one or another render.

The undisputed leader in the 3D modeling software market is Autodesk 3ds Max - this is Punchinel's secret. Sometimes it doesn't even need to be specified. According to Anton Stets, general director of the RangeEmotions computer graphics studio (www.rangemotions.ru), 3ds Max uses most of his colleagues for architectural visualization. With Anton, who, while heading his studio, remains a practicing specialist in his field, we talked about the importance of choosing a render for the studio's work and why RangeEmotions was chosen for the product of the Bulgarian company Chaos Group - V-Ray for Autodesk 3ds Max.

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RangeEmotions is mainly concerned with animation rendering as the most spectacular. This work is very painstaking and voluminous. The latest four-minute architectural visualization for the Mountain Carousel project to date required the rendering of more than 6,000 frames in thirty “shots” (three-dimensional scenes). The illustrations show that the scenes are replete with objects: some buildings in the field of view of the virtual camera sometimes came across six to seven dozen, not to mention many other objects. This is a huge load on rendering, and Anton Stets is confident that no V-Ray analog would cope with the task in any reasonable time frame.

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There are other renders for 3ds Max (mental ray, Scanline), they also allow you to solve serious problems, but, in Stez's opinion, there is nothing better for working with architectural rendering, interiors and exteriors than V-Ray. It allows you to achieve an image as close to reality as possible with minimal effort, to create a deeper global illumination. "The advantages of V-Ray are rendering speed and a juicy, tasty picture," Anton Stets defines.

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V-Ray's speed may seem like an ephemeral advantage, but only at first glance. It would seem, what prevents the rather lengthy rendering procedure from leaving overnight without taking up working time? This is sometimes done when the final version of the image is rendered. However, in the process of work, many test renderings are done, and the total time for this procedure can take up to half of the working time. “With V-Ray we render a typical image in 40-50 minutes. And, for example, mental ray can do the same in 5-6 hours,”says Anton.

The quality of RangeEmotions work is largely due to the fact that V-Ray provides multifaceted settings for materials, a wide selection of lighting nuances and camera positions. Anton Stets does not at all claim that the final image cannot be obtained without V-Ray. Can. But with much more effort, with more emphasis and time-consuming post-processing. This is another significant gain in time - the most important resource in business.

No less important in the work of RangeEmotions is the fact that V-Ray helps to conveniently solve volumetric problems, working on scenes with a large number of polygons (the basic quantitative unit of a three-dimensional scene that characterizes its detail and complexity). V-Ray can render a scene with 10-30 million polygons in one pass, and in its absence it would be necessary to manage 2-3 million. Without V-Ray, a complex scene has to be either simplified, losing the main thing - in realism, or broken into fragments that can be rendered by another render. Here's an example. Specialists from RangeEmotions often have to include in scenes large spaces filled with objects of the same type, most often trees, while one tree can "weigh" two million polygons. V-Ray has a special device for calculating such territories - V-Ray Proxy, which can easily cope with a forest of 100-150 thousand trees. Stets could not remember any other render capable of such a task. But is it just about convenience? No, because besides convenience, time is again at stake. “It is possible to make modern projects without V-Ray, but it is time consuming and expensive. You will have to beat the scene into parts and spend a lot of time composing. Something will need to be recalculated several times, because some scenes will simply not be counted,”says Stets, succinctly explaining why he does not see alternatives to V-Ray.

With V-Ray, the company saves time, makes more projects, and makes more money, so it's no surprise that V-Ray itself is not free.3ds Max costs 120-200 thousand rubles for one personal or network license and already includes mental ray rendering. V-Ray requires additional investments - about 30 thousand rubles. RangeEmotions currently uses four on-premises V-Ray licenses, but each one pays off in a single project, Stez says. At the same time, RangeEmotions regretfully notes that a customer in Russia, as a rule, has little interest in the legality of the performer's software, which hinders the development of a civilized market in our country. At the same time, according to Stets, no one has yet succeeded in hacking V-Ray while fully preserving its functionality. The product is protected by a special USB-key for hardware protection ("dongle"), without which the program does not work. The developers have managed to preserve convenience here: your license is tied to the "dongle", and you can use the program on any computer - at work, at home or on a visit, if you have not forgotten to take this miniature device with you.

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V-Ray is developing quite quickly, and the licensing of the software allows the company, by downloading an update from the manufacturer's website, to use new features immediately, without waiting for half measures from hackers. Time is also important here, because, according to RangeEmotions, in Moscow, where the studio is based, there are no more than a dozen serious players left on the architectural visualization market after the crisis, and in no case should you lose competitive advantages. Of course, V-Ray is not a panacea, the program itself does not guarantee success. The success of RangeEmotions, according to Stets, lies in the approach to work. The fact that the company in 95% of cases uses its own models, and not models from common templates on the network, in that the models are "refreshed" by processing before reuse. After all, for Anton Stets, as a 3D artist, the main strength of his studio is in ideas. And V-Ray allows these ideas to be realized.

Alexander Osinev

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