Lookdev and Raytracer/Renderer question

InstaMAT
1

Hello!

I am Mari user, and currently I have been enjoying the way InstaMAT is working with UDIMS, performance is good all things considered, I got to note that although it is very impressive software, i have encountered a few crashes, especially during the baking of the mesh. (It didn’t even show any progress, and after terminating Instamat process, it froze my whole system for good 15 minutes , no BSOD though).

Regarding the exports, I saw there is an option for USDZ export, however I did not see a USD authoring tool - something that is present in Mari thanks to Pixar’s plug-in and innate USD authoring tool, letting an easier preview of the resulting texturing via hydra delegate. (Sadly that only creates an USD Standard Surface though!) It would be a nice if similiar or maybe better( ; ) ) authoring tool existed for ppl within VFX industry!

On that note though: I have noticed that the Raytracer from AMD is there to preview the current texturing result, which is nice, however;
It currently seems to not support UDIM meshes.
For me, it can only run on my Ryzen cpu, since I have a 3090 Nvidia GPU.

Is there any plans for integrating any other raytracer’ engines, or is it possible to create a plugin for a vendor’ renderers?
i.e. Pixar’s Renderman to preview render outputs?

Thank’s!

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Welcome to the forum @Chrno !

It’s awesome that you think MAT is impressive and I’m glad you enjoy the UDIM performance. :star_struck: It’s hard for us to benchmark in real-world scenarions. I believe this is something you can only do if you’re really deep in the UDIM world and know relative performance of other apps.

In our tests, MAT is extremely stable - our CEO ran MAT through a crunch during the live stream for 3h without issues or crashes (btw, if you haven’t seen it, you have to see it, some workflows are crazy!)

https://youtube.com/live/jVMsGm5K79U?feature=share

The whole thing is a must watch but my favorites are:

  • 1:30:00 → Mesh boolean in the node based workflow
  • 1:40:00 → Mesh scatter to bake to texture workflow
  • 1:47:00 → Layering, scalable texturing + watch that all the way to the end

Crashes during the baking of the mesh. (It didn’t even show any progress, and after terminating Instamat process, it froze my whole system for good 15 minutes , no BSOD though).

I think the UI currently is not really adapted to the UDIM workload. It does not report progress, so it might take a while. I recommend using the GPU baker for UDIM meshes, otherwise things can take pretty long on the CPU with high resolutions.

With that being said, we can’t handle every case so there’s is likely a reason for the crash. Please submit the crash report with a description of what happened so we can investigate it. We take both crashes and top-tier performance serious.

I did not see a USD authoring tool - something that is present in Mari thanks to Pixar’s plug-in and innate USD authoring tool, letting an easier preview of the resulting texturing via hydra delegate

Indeed, we do not have an authoring tool for USD, but we’re open to supporting this in the long term. The upside is that you have a wide array of export formats from USDZ to GLTF, GLB and FBX and more.

Right now, you can implement viewport shaders to override how light is integrated and you can also write your own tonemap operators by setting the viewport tonemap to “Linear” and simply tonemapping in the shader.

On that note though: I have noticed that the Raytracer from AMD is there to preview the current texturing result, which is nice, however;
It currently seems to not support UDIM meshes.
For me, it can only run on my Ryzen cpu, since I have a 3090 Nvidia GPU.

Indeed, it’s sadly somewhat limited. A plugin infrastructure is something that we’re absolutely interested in building. Apart from that, we also have plans our own raytracer that’s better geared towards viewport/realtime - that’s better for material and asset texturing, we feel that RPR just does not seem to be ideal for that.

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