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.

Paul Roberts is a 3DS Max generalist with over 10 years of experience, lecturer for the last 6 and editor at Max Underground. Based in the UK, he specializes in architectural visualization and is currently working with Itoo Software on their documentation and tutorials. Paul can be reached by writing him at proberts@cgpress.org.

Related Links:

• ICube R&D group, makers of VRayPattern VRayPattern homepage - see the Gallery section for various uses of the plugin
• VRayPattern manual (PDF) PatternMaker - a free script by Paul Roberts designed to aid the process of creating meshes that tile seamlessly. It functions without the plugin but it’s especially useful for working with VRayPattern. The script was conceived while writing this review.

Notes:

• A trial version can be downloaded from ICube’s website (click on “Downloads” tab)
• VRayPattern requires Chaos Group’s V-Ray 1.5 (SP2-SP6) and above

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Tags: VRayPattern | Scattering | ICube