VP 2.0 upgrade

[matto.schmidt]

Bring VP 2.0 into the present! 

1.  Screen Space GI

2.  Screen space reflections

3.  Bloom

4.  Increase Light limit to at least 30 or 100

5.  Better transparency handling in scenes with cards, fluids, etc.

6.  Other Screen space effects like glow and lens effects such as flares and things like water on lens, rain on lens, light leaks, etc.

7.  Update the Arnold toon Shader to work with VP 2.0 on a professional level as seen in all modern Japanese anime film and tv post 2016.  Companies like polygon pictures have in house toonshaders working in VP 2.0 and results are almost impossible to tell difference from hand drawn.  This will require an intuitive interface, procedural and textural and ramp modifiers for line weight (better than maya toon) as well as a powerful interactive vertex normal editor which is key and a high quality highlight and shadow mask painting methodology.

8.  A Grease Pencil tool that is at least as good as Blender.  This would revolutionize Maya and make it a 1 stop option for 2d anim studios, 2.5d cut out rig workflows, Previs and story boarding and storyvis workflows.  That combined with Blender’s powerful modifiers make all of the 2d and 2.5d workflows that require multiple software achievable in 1 location and integrated with 3d, lighting and rendering.

5.  A better and more powerful instancing system that is at least as capable as Blender or C4d cloning.  Part of this instancing should include a high level, artist friendly but tech/td capable Scatter tool that makes use of whatever is the underlying architecture (I assume bifrost as I believe Mash is being replaced by it).  You can scatter with Mash placer and Xgen but neither are great options and Maya’s instancer can’t handle professional studio levels of scattering.

6.  A true procedural Mograph/Vector workflow (mash is cool but it is super limited) that competes with C4ds ability to replicate, animate and modify mograph elements with high level modifier and dynamic operations that scale and interact in real-time (again I assume this is a bifrost methodology).

6.  Imposter workflow - easy quick way to generate game style imposters.

7.  Better VP shaders and procedural shaders similar to the shader workflows in Unreal/unity and even Blender that have better control over vertex and UV animation, transparency as well as lookdev compositing techniques (including a flip book node like the obscure and hard to use Shaderfx one).  This will allow you to create composite fix like in games with multiple animated elements using particles and flip books and simple Uv animations.  As well as the ability to turn off per shader Ambient Occlusion like the shaderFx toggle (which btw kinda doesn’t work anymore - it turns of Ssaoc but then if the object had transparency which is main reason to use it cast a light hue across the whole object).

9.  Light fog

10.  Fix shadow casting not working in large environments

11.  Fix point light shadows - they don’t really work in Vo 2.0

12.  Create a skydome node that lets you assign a scene environment dome( maybe even a ground too) similar to aisky light or old mental ray ibl node,  but instead of a light this is just for creating an environ in VP so no need to do tricks like reverse normals and turn of shadow receive and casting etc.  The node could have lots of controls like time of day and let you animate through and control opacity saturation etc.

12.  Good VP volumetric clouds.  There are 3rd party tools out there That can do nice clouds in maya.  Currently the best workflow is to fill geo with noparticles, emit fluids and you can get nice clouds but more than a handful of these bigs down the scene fast and bifrost aero cloud is incredibly heAvy.  There should just be a good volumetric asset type in VP that lets you use polys as guide for clouds, god rays, light fog beams, fog etc - kinda like the legacy volume primitives.

13.  A really good, fast VP 2 water shader.

[matto.schmidt]

!