V-Ray Tuner for Maya 4.5.2 for Maya (maya script)

Version History

• Added per-light pass rendering script. More on this below.
• Added sync light size and target rect lights buttons.
• Added a bunch of little feedback things like GI readout on load/refresh and resolution settings. Lots of hot help added so look at the Help line and Script Editor feedback for new stuff.
• Option to load V-Ray plug-in if it's not loaded.
• Quick LWFMe button to set up a linear workflow in one click.
• Launch IMap Viewer from Utilities menu.
• Added padding to right so scroll bar doesn't crop in by default
• Made menus with lots of stuff to save space.
• Added another row of checkbox controls to some common features for animators. To keep it less confusing, I organized these logically in vertical rows according to areas they affect (DMC, Linear Workflow, etc).
• Added LightMaps menu to give quick access to disk cache modes for Irradiance Map and Light Cache for animators. You need to set up the cache file paths first and then these work as expected. Feedback about which is active is given if you hit Refresh or change one of the menu settings.
• Various V-Ray RT specific items added.
• Added Maya2VRay material converter. All code for this written and supported by Paul Dreisen paul@dryzen.com. Thanks again, Paul.
• Increased Max AA DMC samples slider for those using high values with Nederhorst settings or very high DMC adaptation.
• Option to load Console.app from Utilities for render feedback for Mac OS X. In Windows, this is the Output Window (it was created because there is no stdout for Windows). Unfortunately, since there are so many different distros for Linux, there's no way to pick one file that I can launch on Linux, so this is OS X only.
• Updated Attach Cam procedure for V-Ray 2. It probably won't work with 1.5 now.

• V-Ray for Maya to V-Ray MaxScript now written in MEL for all platforms: http://www.vimeo.com/22251111
• Added an Overscan control to camera sliders for V-Ray since vertical fitting with physical camera nodes attached doesn't work.
• Target Light no longer cares which object is selected first, the Rect Light or the target.

• Prompt to save out MaxScript file for converted materials. Launches in text editor after saving. Output is automatically sent to clipboard on Mac OS X. 
• Made Material Dropper script to copy first-selected objects' material to other objects.  http://www.vimeo.com/22418643

• Added a warning on Render button for when meshes that are invisibile in reflections are detected. You can see this in my video here: http://www.vimeo.com/24083908 

• Added V-RayRT batch render to Utilities menu. For guide on how to use this, see my blog post here: http://polygonspixelsandpaint.tumblr.com/post/6388153858 

• Fixed end frame for V-Ray RT batches. Moved RT batch rendering to RT menu. 

• Added a Unique Name script to Utilities. This can be used to fix duplicate node names that cause errors for things like Per Light Rendering, which scans nodes in your scene and trips on duplicate names. Thanks to Matt Lefevre for that.
• Added a linearize texture nodes script to Materials menu. Select your File or Ramp, etc. node and run the script. Works on both colour and alpha/greyscale connections. http://www.vimeo.com/25841150
• Added a Material script to rename File nodes according to the referenced disk file name. http://www.vimeo.com/25919762 

• Added Shellac Me script to Materials to wrap currently selected meshes in a BlendMat / Fresnel shader for clearcoat wood/ceramic glaze type setup. http://www.vimeo.com/26489677
• Added Send to Command Line Render/Send to Command Line Render and Sleep script to Utilities. http://www.vimeo.com/26489373 This is like a pseudo job manager since it sends the disk file to render with currently active values of dmcThreshold, dmcs_adaptiveAmount, dmcs_adaptiveThreshold, dmcMaxSubdivs, dmcMinSubdivs, and current resolution. Only supported on OS X currently. This is just my personal tool being shared and I use OS X, so please don't complain about lack of cross-platform things. This one will be ported to Windows eventually.
• Added unlock camera script to utilities. This removes the lock for selected cameras, so they can be deleted.
• Updated all menu items to accurately reflect checkbox states, where applicable. 
  
  

• In ShellacMe script, linked value of coat bump to the value of the base material bump.
• ShellacMe now names BlendMaterial with base material name + _FresnelBlendMat instead of mesh name. 
• Made an automatic "Assign unique colour ID to all selected objects' materials" script in Materials. http://vimeo.com/27873210
• Command liner works with spaces in names of paths

• Some tidying up done
• Added region rendering option to command line renderer. This works with animation frame range settings to make it easy to render out a crop of your animation from the selected area in the Maya render view (not the VFB). http://www.vimeo.com/27943456
• Added Windows compatibility to "send to command line render", "batch region renderer" and also works with variations with sleep functions. http://www.vimeo.com/28249221
• Replaced Show Samples checkbox with Displacements, since this is more likely to be something you'd want to toggle for quick renders.
• Added a Material script to name V-Ray Material according to the name of the File in the color slot (Filename sans extension + _Vray).

• Added a "Strip pasted__ from names" script to Utilities.
• Updated GI dropdown menu so it accurately reflects current primary and secondary GI config.
• Added a batch render file utility for all OSes. Writes a command line render to a shell script file on your desktop. Appends batches to that file for multiple jobs. http://vimeo.com/29495908
• Also added "Append Sleep Command to Render File on Desktop" command so you can make a set of jobs in batch file on desktop and then write the sleep command at end so machine sleeps after batch job completes.
• Created an "Per-Light Render Exposure Tweak" to utilities for per-light rendering round-trip workflow for adjusting exposure. Nuke workflow: http://vimeo.com/29071487 Photoshop: http://vimeo.com/29101160

• Made command line render scripts Linux compatible, with exception of those with sleep commands. Tested in CentOS 5.6
• Per-light render script updated to work with spotlights and directional lights.
• Added a Make Reflector Card script to utilities menu. Select object and run script to make a plane that is aimed at the selected object. The plane has primary vis and shadows off for use with creating reflections. Still affects occlusion though, so you'll need to turn that off for AO passes.
• Added a Toggle Env Texture script to utilities.
• Per-light render script updated to work with spotlights and directional lights.
• Added a Make Reflector Card script to utilities menu. Select object and run script to make a plane that is aimed at the selected object. The plane has primary vis and shadows off for use with creating reflections. Still affects occlusion though, so you'll need to turn that off for AO passes.
• Added a Toggle Env Texture script to utilities.
• Some additional options in Utilities menu for per-light render workflows
• Fixed per-light rendering to recognize enabled flag turned off for V-Ray lights so it doesn't just render a blank image

• Added material worker script to Materials menu to make creation of materials easier: http://vimeo.com/37860544
• Added Linux support for sleep after render
• Optimize button no longer changes dynamic mesh setting to static. V-Ray 2 fixed the problem with slower dynamic mesh rendering.
• Added tiled rendering command line rendering script for huge scenes: http://vimeo.com/37867248

• Better lighting and more preview shape options for Material Worker Layer: https://vimeo.com/38930269
• Replaced World Scale for Light Cache (WS) toggle with Distributed Rendering (DR) toggle in top checkbox set

• Material Worker Layer no longer makes a folder in your temp images when you hit IPR Render button (use the palette IPR button)
• New function for testing utility render nodes in the Material Worker Layer. Select the utility to preview and hit Render Utility Preview. It will map your selected Utility onto your current worker shape. See it in action: https://vimeo.com/39582527
• When you remove the Material Worker Layer, it puts the camera position back to where it was before you started tweaking the material
• Added Car Paint material support to Material Worker Layer
• Added Distributed Render Settings to Utilities menu for quick toggling of DR slaves

• Changed Optimize button to make smaller buckets if distributed rendering is enabled
• Added self-illumination in V-Ray Material support to per-light rendering. Same workflow: select meshes with the mat light or materials with self-illumination and run script: http://player.vimeo.com/video/44667537
• Added a max paths per pixel option to V-Ray RT settings. This now works with RT Batch Render script. http://player.vimeo.com/video/44669198
• Removed GI Contrast slider. Just not commonly used enough to warrant the space

• Fixed sleep command for Linux - needs to run with sudo on RHEL distros. You'll need to enable your user to run pm-suspend without a sudo prompt: http://polygonspixelsandpaint.tumblr.com/post/29222395621
• Added a Add Round Edge script to utilities menu for giving round edges to multiple selected objects
• Added the ability to use a copy of the selected object as the object for Material Worker Layer. Select your mesh, enable "Use selected" and hit Material Worker Layer button.
• Changed parts of script that used "RedoPreviousIPR" to "RedoPreviousIPRRender" because it wasn't working in some Windows configs.
• Added ability to render a single selected light for per-light rendering. This gives you the ability to update one light pass render without having to re-render all lights. Select your light and run PerLightRender from button or menu.

• Material Copy Dropper in Materials menu. This is similar to the Material Dropper script that lets you apply materials from the first selected object to all the subsequently selected objects but this applies the copied shader from a "Duplicate Network" operation so you can use the source material as a starting point for your next object's material. https://vimeo.com/49519152
• Stored Texture Reloader. I got tired of having to dig down to a file node when doing external tweaks on a texture file, so I added this. It lets you store the working texture file and refreshes it when you select the menu item again. Select a new File node and it will replace the stored texture as the one you want to refresh. https://vimeo.com/51760153
• Gamma Correct Me now has an interface to select the type of thing you want to degamma for a linear workflow: colour swatches of your selected material(s) or selected texture(s). This way, you can just avoid gamma correct nodes, set your swatch colours and just do all the gamma correction in one step with this. https://vimeo.com/51760347
• Gamma Correct Me script for textures now uses V-Ray attribute for File node to avoid black textures in viewport. It uses a Gamma Correct node for everything else and works with ramps, blendColors, etc.
• Added Brute Force/Brute Force and Light Cache/Light Cache presets to GI modes dropdown.
• Added Transfer UVs script to Utils menu. Select source first and all targets after that and run script to transfer UVs.
• DaveBake420 script now automatically enables texture baking render settings and then disables them on completion
• Added 200% upres option to the R% render preview size. I've found I wanted this occasionally. This doubles the actual resolution, not just the preview resolution so it will ask for confirmation. https://vimeo.com/51760916
• Select all of selected type script in Utils. Great for selecting all V-Ray materials for Channel Editor tweaks on all of them. https://vimeo.com/51760347
• Select Missing Textures script added to Materials menu. Checks if any of the links to file nodes are missing links and selects them if they are. https://vimeo.com/51760916
• New Better UV Checker tool in Materials menu. I made a custom colour UV grid and the script will prompt you to download it automatically if it can't find it in your home script path. Because Windows lacks a command line download tool like curl, I had to use Python and it might need a couple tries to grab the file. https://vimeo.com/50775752

• Select objects with selected materials script selects objects, not just faces, for selected material https://vimeo.com/53424371
• Added feature to Material Copy Dropper: if only one object is selected, it will duplicate the material and upstream nodes and apply it to the selected object
• Gamma Correct Me now gamma corrects connected subtextures as well as swatches for V-Ray Materials https://vimeo.com/53337680
• Gamma Correct Me dialog automatically selects the menu item for the item type you selected: file or V-Ray Mat
• Added Gamma Correct Me support for VRayFastSSS2 mat. Works for both swatches and attached file nodes
• Added per-light exposure tweak support for V-Ray Light Materials, V-Ray Materials (self-illum slot is adjusted by exposure), Sun and Environment (Sky).
• Added script to select and copy files that are outside project sourceimages folder to sourceimages and relink them https://vimeo.com/53430929

• Edit all selected images script to open all selected file nodes in image editor
• Shellac me now enables shadows for both base and coat materials. I always use this, so if you don't want this on, remove these two lines from the script: setAttr ($currentSurfaceShader[0] + ".bumpShadows") 1; and this: setAttr ($fresnelCoater + ".bumpShadows") 1;
• Cleaned up the linearize texture scripts to work with any type of texture and now it doesn't gamma correct a node if it's parented to a gamma correct already. It's more foolproof overall.

• Optimize setting now prompts you for core count when distributed rendering is on. Use the max threads of any of your machines that are active in the render. If you have a local machine that's eight cores (or four hyperthreaded) and a slave machine that has 16-cores hyperthreaded (32-threads), enter 32. Disable DR and click Optimize again and it will properly set the thread count for the local machine only. https://vimeo.com/60266819
• Added a disable texture filtering script to Materials menu so you can turn off filtering for File nodes all at once.
• DaveBake420 script has got a big uprade in 3.3. Now has an option to comp your Dirt V-Ray pass with the diffuse channel after baking. Good for adding grittiness to diffuse textures with little work. https://vimeo.com/60284511
• Fix Light Size button replaced with create Sun & Sky script. V-Ray no longer has issues with manually-scaled lights so the script is no longer necessary.
• Sprite Maker script now works with currently selected camera, not just main persp camera.
• New Material Swapper script that should replace the "Maya and mental ray Mat to VRay" script for conversion of Maya materials to V-Ray mats and back. Paul Dreisen graciously provided the original script but I tend to convert more between Maya's materials and V-Ray than mental ray mats and I wanted to beef up the accuracy of conversion that's done by the script to save time. This script does a really good job of converting things like Phong materials from Mudbox FBX files to V-Ray, with all channel-mapped texture intact. Also great for Paint Effects polygon material conversion. https://vimeo.com/60095069

• Composite pre-bake diffuse colour with V-Ray Dirt REComposite pre-bake diffuse colour with V-Ray Dirt RE. https://vimeo.com/61814801
• Changed DaveBake420 10% value to be 512x512, instead of 409.6x409.6 (10% of 4096).
• Attach Cam button now prompts you to add and enable physical cam attributes if you don't have them already on the selected camera. If you select no, it will still hook up the overscan setting.
• materialDropper and materialCopyDropper now work on face-level selections as well as objects
• Optimize button now sets memory setting (sys_rayc_dynMemLimit) to 80% of total memory in your system.
• Fixed material worker layer script. I had started to implement a new feature but forgot to finish it so it was broken for a couple versions.
• Per-light render script now does solo light re-renders. If you have a light selected and run per-light render, it will only render that selected light. https://vimeo.com/61894341
• Small fix to per light exposure light tweak - it could fail to properly detect your light selection before.
• Revert To Saved Document script added to Utils menu.

• Added Point Light support to per-light render script.
• Fixed Optimize button script for Maya 2014. Maya 2014 has a bug that returns the wrong number for RAM amount so, if you're running 2014, the script asks you to enter your memory amount in GB.

• Fixed a bug in the V-Ray/Maya material swapper script. It wouldn’t assign the converted Lambert/Blinn/Phong mats before.
• V-Ray/Maya material swapper recognizes Displacement attachments on parent shading groups.
• Added a prompt to save file before doing command line renders.
• Linearize script now works with V-Ray Material Hair 3 materials.
• Material Threshold Fix script added to Materials menu. This lowers all the Cutoff Threshold settings for V-Ray Materials to 0.002 so that you don’t get bad falloffs for smooth gradations when rendering.
• Material ID Matcher. Matches material IDs between selected V-Ray Materials.

• Optimize button’s V-Ray dynamic memory adjustment now works automatically with versions 2014 and over. No more manual setting of RAM amount needed.
• Added an SSS Prepass Rate Switch script to Materials menu. This lets you set the prepass rate for all SSS materials at once so you can dial it down to something like -1 for draft renders and then put it back up for final renders. Can save a lot of time.
• Removed Disable Texture Filtering script from Materials menu. It turns out that disabling texture filtering will load the full resolution textures (no matter how small it is in the scene) so it can use a lot of memory needlessly.
• Per-light exposure tweak fixed for non-VRay lights.
• Select Z-Depth RE added to Utilities. Saves digging into render settings to adjust Z-Depth parameters.
• Select V-Ray Sky added to Utilities. Same as above but for sky node.
• Start/Stop IPR Render menu items added to RT menu so you can start V-Ray RT from there.
• Render log/console script in Utilities menu now opens the vray4maya_renderlog.txt in OS X’s Console.app
• Make Frustum script added to Utils menu. It makes a Nuke style 3D frustum for selected cameras and parents it under your camera node. https://vimeo.com/77261386
• Split Utilities and put render stuff into a Render menu because there was too much stuff in the Utilities menu before
• Replaced “D” displacement toggle checkbox with “PL” for prefilter light cache since it’s more commonly used.
• Per-light render script now has a simple interface and toggle for VFB curves and levels. The "Proceed to next light" option is used to cancel renders. If you uncheck it and hit escape, it won't proceed to the next light. This prevents hammering cancel to stop it from rendering all your lights if you want to stop the operation.

• Reload All Textures - reloads all.....wait for it..... textures.
• Polygonal Displacement Preview added to material menu
• Toggle Displace As Diffuse script added to Materials menu.
• Increase viewport2 preview texture size script added to Materials.
• Lowered physical camera F-stop slider min to 0.01
• Fixed Material Swapper script. It could fail if you didn't have displacement attached to the original material.
• Added the ability to reapply original material to V-Ray/Maya Material Swapper script.
• Dock Maya Render window script added to Render menu. This prevents it from popping up every time you want to just render using the VFB.
• Apply any object's subtexture as diffuse toggle - script added to Materials menu
• Initial V-Ray Tuner/Refresh info that is shown in the command line feedback now includes your scene's preview resolution.

• Added V-Ray Tuner Presets manager for render settings in the Render menu. This is a nice way to create render presets that don't affect EVERYTHING like Maya's render presets do. This only affects the toggles you see represented in the V-Ray Tuner interface, so you can use a universal "Draft" setting for different resolution documents and click the load for final render settings that you prefer and only have the relevant quality features changed. https://vimeo.com/103680760

Warning: V-Ray 3.6 was the last version to support versions of V-Ray 2.x so it's possible that you can get errors if you use it with version 2.4. Some of the features use things like V-Ray's query options that are 3.0 only: http://www.can-con.ca/tumblrpics/vray_commandline_output.jpg

• Use Environment Volume toggle added to new row of checkbox toggles to enable/disable environment fog. Great for speeding up your scene/material building and draft rendering since you don't always want fog slowing you down.
• Use Embree toggle added to new row of checkbox toggles. Embree is Intel's CPU ray tracing optimization kernel that is used in V-Ray 3.0 (and RenderMan 19). If you have an Intel-based CPU, regardless of host OS, it should always be on to get the fastest render times.
• Optimize script enables Embree if V-Ray version is 3 or above.
• Transfer Missing Assets for DR toggle added to new row of checkbox toggles. This is the awesome new V-Ray 3.0 feature that does texture transfers in the background between Mac OS, Windows and Linux without having to use SAMBA and URL translation type fixes.
• Use Local Machine for DR toggle added to new row of checkbox toggles. Good if you're using a laptop with faster machines as your slave workhorses.
• Use Cached Assets toggle added to new row of checkbox toggles. Use this if you use distributed rendering since it will save uploading assets again. I've tested it extensively and the caching is now bulletproof at detecting asset changes.

See all those in action here: http://player.vimeo.com/video/103675750

• Toggle Object Sub-texture as Diffuse script now supports all material types.
• Organized Materials menu into submenus for clearer outline of features and to take up less space.
• Light Cache Prefilter Samples added to sliders.
• Added a couple sliders to new Global Material/Light Tweaks section to do a single change to all reflection subdivs and light subdivs for quick switches from draft to final settings. http://www.can-con.ca/tumblrpics/subdivs_switch.png
• Added CUDA option to RT menu.
• Added RT max noise slider to V-Ray RT sliders.
• Wrap in VRayMtlWrapper added to Materials menu. Good for making mats that need to be matte bases. Select your mesh and then run the script.
• Added prompt to LWFMe to see if you will manually linearize your textures and swatches. If you pick Yes, it does everything except enable "Linear Workflow" which is the dumb way to do automatic linear worklows and isn't recommended for use with V-Ray anyway. Basically, always click Yes and manually linearize your nodes unless you are using newer Maya versions with automatic colour management (2015 extension and later). I'll eventually remove the LWF setting altogether in the V-Ray Tuner UI but it's good to see that it's always off while you work.
• Small fix to deGamma script to work with V-Ray mat display in viewport 2.
• Added V-Ray Tuner Presets manager for render settings in the Render menu. This is a nice way to create render presets that don't affect EVERYTHING like Maya's render presets do. This only affects the toggles you see represented in the V-Ray Tuner interface, so you can use a universal "Draft" setting for different resolution documents and click the load for final render settings that you prefer and only have the relevant quality features changed. https://vimeo.com/103680760
• Three point lighter script added to Utils menu. Just adds three V-Ray Rect Lights to your scene around the object selected so you can get a basic three-point light setup. Groups the lights so you can scale and move them easily.
• Replaced LWF toggle with DSS (Divide Shader Subdivs). Since the LWF setting is deprecated and the LWFMe button no longer enables it, I removed the LWF altogether since it should be avoided. Divide Shader Subdivs is a new V-Ray 3.0 feature that lets you disable the sampler reduction of shaders so you don't have to have the AA subdivs set way high to guarantee a minimum level of sampling for shaders.
• Added new V-Ray Skin Material to the Gamma Correct Me linearize list. This is the new skin shader that has built-in Fresnel and raytracing scattering so it should be preferred over SSS2 mats.
• Added a new slider section for V-Ray 3 progressive renderer control with controls for its relevant options.
• "Render only selected" added to Per-light render script UI so you can skip re-rendering all lights/light meshes and just grab that one.
• Added a wireframe snapshot script to get Maya wireframe snapshots in the VFB. https://vimeo.com/107419311
• Color balance and other color controls added to per-light render's toggle option.
• Raised max subdivs for Global Material / Lights tweak slider to 100
• Added the V-Ray Tuner dropdown menu settings to the Render Settings Presets file for storing / restoring.

• Fixed V-Ray Tuner Presets feature to not flake out if there were spaces in your preset names. You will need to resave your presets to load them since the presets text file is a different format. Don't use ? in your preset names or it will screw up since it uses that as the text file's delimiter between parameters now.
• Sources Render Settings window on first load to fix some things not working without first opening that window.
• Added a Launch Maya Instance (Mac) for Mac OS X to open another instance of Maya (terminal command is "open -n /Applications/Autodesk/maya2015/Maya.app" if you want to know what it does). The script runs another copy of the version you're running.
• Fixed bug with Material Worker Layer script where it could fail to clean up properly
  
   

• Changed FieldMaxValue 500 for material and light samples input text field.
• V-Ray 3.0 Skin Mat support added to Material Worker Layer script.
• VFB Snapshot Camera now has a prompt for which perspective camera you want to snapshot. This should hopefully remove all need for the Maya render panel in your work.
• Added a toggle for Maya's color management to Render menu. V-Ray doesn't currently support Maya's color management setup so it's best turned off when using V-Ray RT in a viewport or else you will be applying a 2.2 gamma to your viewport/.
• Added a Toggle XGen Guides Visibility for V-Ray RT, so it doesn't render X-Gen Guides while you do RT renders.

• Sampler Toggle in Render menu to change between adaptive subdiv and progressive sampler types. Shows feedback in Script Editor line.
• Active sampler type is printed to Script Editor with other info when you hit Refresh.
• Added Adaptive Subdiv sliders to DMC and Adaptive Subdiv Antialiasing section of sliders.
• Optimize settings button now sets sampler type to Adaptive Subdivision, which is best for bucket DR rendering.
• VFB snapshot now works correctly when you have VFB panel loaded.
• Fixed V-Ray Tuner Presets to now store/restore Progressive Render and V-Ray RT slider settings. Also added support for new Adaptive Subdiv sliders.
• "Move current scene images from images/tmp to images" script added to Utils menu. I got sick of doing this manually – it's also a good way to ensure that a render you like doesn't get overwritten by a temporary render. It prompts you to confirm if this would result in a clobber of other files of the same name.