VRayPattern review

G-Buffer and Animation Support

Final version of the test scene – created by Paul Roberts. VRayPattern was used for everything except the road and roof tiles (click to see 2 images).

In the test renders, VRayPattern had no issues supporting G-Buffer channels and render elements.

Since VRayPattern works on texturing principles, animation of the surface geometry is supported, however at present, animation of the pattern geometry is not. The animation state is sampled at frame 0 irrespective of the active timeline so there is also currently no easy workaround. If the technology behind VRayPattern is capable of supporting this, it would be an excellent additional feature.

Conclusion

When originally mentioned on the Chaos Group forums back in 2010, VRayPattern was described as “Grass Sea”, which gave an indication of its initial intended purpose and put it in direct competition with scattering plugins and one-click solutions like Autograss. But by allowing the plugin to use any geometry, operate like a texture, and render limitless polygon counts, iCube created a seemingly peerless tool that has the potential to change our approach to modelling and texturing repetitive geometry.

At present VRayPattern is a solid release that has many possible applications. Most of the bugs and quirks are mere irritations that once understood, do not hinder the functionality of a plugin that I continue to find many uses for, particularly as a rough-and-ready panelling tool.

If you find yourself regularly creating vast swathes of repetitive geometry and want low memory consumption and easy set-up, VRayPattern will prove a wise investment. If iCube can resolve the shift plane problem and enable the easy application of a pattern to multiple surfaces, then it could progress from very useful, to invaluable.