Maya 2012 Viewport 2.0 thread

kodde

Hey guys,

Post your tests and conclusions about Maya 2012's Viewport 2.0.

This video shows what's supposed to be new.

I just tried loading one of my CGFX shaded example scenes to see what worked and what didnt. Using my KoddeShader 2.0 rev3.

• SSAO seems to work fine.
• MSAA seems to work but only at 16x? The lower ones don't make any difference in my test scene?
• Shadows, well not out of the box. How do you set this up with CGFX shaders? Anyone got this working? Possible? They never actually confirm that cgfx + shadows works in the video.
• Gamma Correction, well somethings going on. Everything turned whiteish. I tried disabling the gamma correction in my shader parameters and enabling the gamma correction from VP2.0, and it didn't exactly look all that well. I haven't read up on how it's supposed to be used yet to be fair.
• Motion Blur, seems to work similar to non-cgfx. Not perfect imo but works.

kodde

ceebee

Glad you made this thread, I'm stoked about the VP 2.0 in 2012. I haven't picked it up yet but I hope my 4870 allows me to use it unlike 2011, driver issues or some shit.

malcolm

Great idea for a thread. I've just started testing this as we want to use it at our studio for internal prototype videos so we don't have to outsource the rendering on a local farm.

msaa is video card dependent, all the different levels work fine for me but my ati radeon 5850 only has 8x aa so that's all I can set viewport 2.0 to.

Gamma correction seems useless to me, what is this used for besides washing out your scene?

Unfortunately facing ratio does not work so I can't make all my freznel shaders that I like.

Kodde is your shader the best uber shader for environments, I'll get my basic lighting test scene up with screenshots this weekend and from there I'd like to start testing your shader and give you feedback if you're interested.

bugo

SSAO = HEAVY on mine. For some reason...
I like depth of view. Looks pretty neato.

Some cgfx's are not letting me see textures somehow.
I know it's a bit off thread, but where's Turtle renderer they were supposed to ship with 2012? Gosh, I miss it so much.

malcolm

I think turtle was supposed to come with Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suite, but I don't see it in there either? Maybe the missed the deadline and had to ship without it. I was able to get a trial of turtle at work but had to e-mail autodesk.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?id=13420613&siteID=123112

bugo

huh, good to know, I'll do the same.

Delerium

malcolm wrote: »

Great idea for a thread. I've just started testing this as we want to use it at our studio for internal prototype videos so we don't have to outsource the rendering on a local farm.

msaa is video card dependent, all the different levels work fine for me but my ati radeon 5850 only has 8x aa so that's all I can set viewport 2.0 to.

Gamma correction seems useless to me, what is this used for besides washing out your scene?

Unfortunately facing ratio does not work so I can't make all my freznel shaders that I like.

Kodde is your shader the best uber shader for environments, I'll get my basic lighting test scene up with screenshots this weekend and from there I'd like to start testing your shader and give you feedback if you're interested.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEbH62a1YqA[/ame]

kodde

,alcolm> "The best uber shader"... well...
It's one of quite few versatile realtime cgfx shaders for Maya that I've come across so far. There's not more than three or four I know of by heart that I can remember. There's a dedicated link to me shader thread in my signature. You're welcome to give me feedback and I'll try to answer any questions you have if you post them in that thread.

malcolm

Delerium I know the principles behind gamma in games, and why you should be gamma correct. I've discussed it with our rendering engineer many times. My questions is more, why is this useful in Maya, it washes everything out and actually creates banding and other artifacts in the viewport.

Delerium

malcolm wrote: »

Delerium I know the principles behind gamma in games, and why you should be gamma correct. I've discussed it with our rendering engineer many times. My questions is more, why is this useful in Maya, it washes everything out and actually creates banding and other artifacts in the viewport.

Ok, can it be because Maya displays 8bit instead of 16bit colors in the viewport?
I dont use Maya anymore but it seems useless as you say if the viewport is displayed in 8bit which will create banding/artifacts

kodde

I'm guessing you're supposed to convert your entire shader chain to linear and let Maya do the last convertion back to gamma space? Could be that Maya texture nodes have "convert to linear" space functionality and you combine that with the Gamma Correction in the rendering stage?

malcolm

Must be, I noticed there is an option for floating point render target and some settings in there for 32bit and 16bit. I turned on 32 bit and the banding went away with gamma 2.2 on. All my lighting is way too bright now, is the idea of this mode to let you expand the range in your dark gradients?

chronic

the gamma correction in V2.0 is as kodde describes. It is only useful if the shaders, either maya's or custom cgfx work as linear internally, but do not do the conversion back to sRGB for monitor display. The reason you might leave off this step as part of the shader math is that there is a bit more flexibility for things like tonemapping and other full screen effects if your shaders stay linear and you do the conversion as a post process - you dont have to build that code into every shader and adjust those parameters on a per-shader basis.

There is no reason to turn on the 2.2 gamma correction unless you know specifically why and when you need it. The banding issue is directly related to the 8bit target not having enough precision and the 16 and 32 bit buffers obviously fix that.

malcolm

Well after messing around with it for 15min I don't think it's that useful. If you wanted to render out a single model maybe a character or something that didn't require anything more than a 3 point light rig it should be okay, but it would be hard to do an environment at current gen quality unless you baked all the lighting. Either that or used have to accept the fact the lighting and shaders are quite limited. It wouldn't work for the internal videos I'd want to use it for work.

Here's a list of the stuff I found to be missing for basic renders.
-facing ratio hooked up to a ramp is not supported, you'd need a cgfx shader to do any kind of freznel effect.
-point lights don't cast shadows.
-volume lights aren't supported at all, good luck using point lights or negative lights.

kodde

Here's some an easy advice for working with the DOF.

Create a new dedicated render camera, create a measure tools > distance tool, position one of the distance tools locators at the render cameras lens and parent constrain it to the camera, position the other locator where you want the focus to be.

Open the render camera in the attribute editor and go to the DOF parameters, in the Focus Distance parameter write the following:
=distanceDimensionShape1.distance;

You should now have the distance tools measured distance feeding into the Focus Distance parameter. This gives you the nicety of being able to set a focus point with a locator and when you move the render camera around you should still have the same focus point at the locator instead of having to re-tweak these settings whenever you move your camera.

Enjoy

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37lGxHGXLFg[/ame]

malcolm

Nice idea, Kodde I couldn't get your shader to work it errors out in Maya 2012.

kodde

Was it pink error messages about the lights? If so, then just ignore.

malcolm

// Error: cgfxShader "cgfxShader1" : unable to find a valid technique.

kodde

malcolm> Hmm... not the ones I was referring to. I've loaded my shader in Maya 2012 as I mention above with no issues. What kind of graphics card are you using?

malcolm

Radeon 5850

kodde

Malcolm> Yeah ATI cards are a pain when it comes to CGFX shaders. I've had many users with ATI who couldn't get my shader working. I don't think I'm alone when it comes to ATI + CGFX in Maya not working that well.


By the way, did anyone try getting shadows working with any CGFX shader in Maya? Anyone confirm that this works/doesn't work?

bugo

I didn't try, but yeah, ATI + CGFX = no way.

malcolm

Lame, I've been disappointed with this ati since I got it, but there was no choice when I bought the computer from Dell they don't do high end nVidia.

bugo

sorry to hear Malcolm, I'm selling a GTX 260 if u want it

ceebee

Just bumping this thread. Anybody have any good results from using VP 2.0 with characters or anything like that? I'm still using high quality rendering as for some reason weird wireframe shows up on my models despite it not being turned on.

If anybody has any examples of stuff they've done in VP 2.0 now that Maya 2012 is out that would be rad

ScudzAlmighty

I'm working on some renders right now for Earl using 2.0, and for the most part it's working out well, and in fact rending the image with 2.0 (instead of just screen capping) is even better, however there's some weird bugs.
In the viewport I've got joints lights and handles hidden, but the IK handles still show up in 2.0, everything is fine in Default Render) and when I actual render the pic lights and joints are visable in the render but not in the viewport. You can see the joints just above the eyebrows if you look close:





-edit- okay so turning off joints in the main Hide/Show menu (not just the viewport) actually works, but when I turn off lights there the scene goes dark...

It takes some tweaking to get just right and I'm anoyed that I'll have to paint out the joints in PS, but for the most I'm impressed