Hi everyone,
I was wondering if there are any plans regarding advanced material creation in V-Ray for Rhino.
The issue is not that advanced or realistic materials cannot be achieved, they clearly can. The problem is that, with the current Material Editor layout, the process feels unnecessarily complicated and inefficient. Managing multiple bitmaps and masks in a non-nodal interface quickly becomes hard to read and maintain, especially for complex materials.
Considering other programs like 3ds and Blender, having a proper material node system, feels increasingly necessary rather than just a convenience.
Is this something Chaos is actively considering for Rhino?
After using V-Ray for Rhino intensively on a daily basis for several years, we feel we are reaching a sort of plateau.
Having some hands-on experience with Blender and 3ds Max, I think the main areas where V-Ray for Rhino still lags behind are the following.
First, material creation. The overall workflow for creating and managing materials could be improved. In particular:
A more robust PBR map loading workflow would be extremely helpful, ideally with automatic loading of all maps and automatic detection of maps that should use “None” as transfer function.
A global, node-based material view would greatly help when building and managing more complex materials.
Material previews in Rhino have improved a lot over the years, and I really appreciate the work done there, but there are still some bugs in Rendered mode previews, especially when color corrections or similar adjustments are applied.
Second, the asset library. Chaos Cosmos is a good addition, but for professional-level work we almost always rely on third-party assets. The possibility to save and manage these assets in a drag-and-drop library similar to Cosmos (possibly integrated directly into Cosmos) would be a major time saver.
We are aware that V-Ray can feel a bit clunky compared to some newer engines, but that is also part of why we like it. That said, the points above are exactly the kind of improvements that would save us many clicks in everyday production.
I appreciate all the points you sent me.
I can say for sure that there will be a node editor. The custom cosmos assets are also possible, but currently they are not exposed.
I’d like to get more details on the material preview bugs you mentioned. For several releases now the preview images are generated by channeling the shader thru V-Ray first and then displaying the output to Rhino. However in many cases Rhino texturing and especially mapping limitations are the road block. Additionally some improvements with handling opacity/transparency/refraction will be added soon. Could you present some concrete examples where you are seeing problems?
Automatically loading PBR texture maps sounds like a nice touch. I’ll bring that to the table on our side.
Thanks!
In most cases, these are small issues that occur when a map is wrapped into a color correction node or similar setups, causing the correct viewport display to be lost. Typically, we resolve this by manually linking the Diffuse map to the Viewport Display slot.
However, as you can imagine, all these aspects are interconnected. When working on large scenes with complex buildings and a high number of materials, even small issues like this - when multiplied across the project - result in a significant amount of unnecessary manual work and extra clicks over the course of a day.
At the moment I’m not on my workstation, so I cannot send you straightaway;
We often use also Visualarq and that also create often problems vith previews.
As soon as I can efficiently test the issues I’ll reporth them back to you.
