Vray expired 01 Dez 2010

[rogerteddy]

Vray expired 01 Dez 2010 / 3ds Max 2011

hopefully it is a bug...

[vlado]

Most of the V-Ray RT GPU beta licenses do indeed expire today. However V-Ray RT 1.5 should still work fine.

Best regards,
Vlado

[rogerteddy]

So its not a bug and I have to reinstall - downgrade to RT 1.5?

best

rog!

[vlado]

Yes, this would be the best thing to do. If there are still issues, please let us know. We appreciate your participation in the beta test!

Best regards,
Vlado

[rogerteddy]

No problem I still have IRAY for GPU-Rendering

[vlado]

True, but it's not interactive and does not support DR

Best regards,
Vlado

[rogerteddy]

Hi Vlado,

I really like Vray, for me its one of the best renderer out there, but there is other good stuff coming from render developers and at the end what counts is:
- Costings (€ 400 are too high as an upgrade for RT owners)
- Learning Curve (good, same as Iray)
- Efficiency (for me personely the only advantage from 1.5 at this time is a lens effect post filter in 2.0 wich is not worth 400 €, the rest of the upgrade seems more technical or rare usefull, or has influence of the visual quality or speed, so I can stay with 1.5)
- Speed (opencl is slow against cuda, and even with an upgrade in some month, the other renderers made some upgrades too, to speed up renderings)

Best... Rog!

[vlado]

Thanks for the comments!

Best regards,
Vlado

[dpmitchell]

I noticed that too. Wasn't aware of the expiration date, but kept getting license error 98 this morning. I was just getting my hardware together and trying to get the Vray-RT GPU to work over DR, which I was not able to do. Oh well. Like rogerteddy, I'm not sure if a $500 upgrade makes sense solely for the purpose of obtaining Vray-RT GPU (1.5 works fine otherwise for me). Maybe Chaos will decide to change their minds and sell the license to RT separate if there is enough demand for it. I think a LOT of people have 1.5x and may be satisfied with what it offers for the time. The economy is tight right now!

[dpmitchell]

True, but it's not interactive and does not support DR

Best regards,
Vlado

Not yet. I would expect a significant functionality improvement in iray in 3ds Max 2012. It almost seems like the iray that was included in the SA pack is a beta test of sorts.

I still prefer Vray, as most of my scenes are set up with vray lights and materials, and the adjustments are much more intuitive in Vray.

I like that iray can already, at this stage, be used as a production renderer. Nvidia is determined to advance its GPU computing technology at a rapid pace to maintain its marketshare on AMD, and Autodesk is their good buddy.

I like that Vray-RT is interactive and that it supports a growing number of Vray lights/materials/objects. Will be nice when Vray implements those features into a production line...and at that point, it will justify the upgrade. At this point, the RT GPU version just sets you up for a let down once you switch back to CPU production and hit "render"

[vlado]

I like that iray can already, at this stage, be used as a production renderer.

So can V-Ray RT GPU. While there are features that iray supports and which V-Ray RT GPU currently does not, the reverse is also true. We are also committed to developing V-Ray RT GPU and one of the nice things is that it is not tied to nVidia. In any case it will be an intersting year for hardware And while I cannot comment on what improvements will or will not be in 3ds Max 2012, I'm confident that V-Ray RT GPU will still be useful.

Best regards,
Vlado

[iancamarillo]

from what I read on mental ray's iray product description, iray is not an interactive renderer. which doesn't bridge the gap between viewport and production render. max's recent viewport hardware shading is awesome, but I've saved time and money firing up RT to get the most accurate representation of what the final render is going to look like. i thought iray would battle RT but they aren't even in the same class, right?

[scottsch]

Noticed the date as Dec 1 and figured that's why RT stopped working. In going back to 1.5 CPU... RT seems a lot slower. Maybe it's not but it seems so. I was hoping someone would post some GTX 580 benchmark scenes.

[dpmitchell]

So can V-Ray RT GPU. While there are features that iray supports and which V-Ray RT GPU currently does not, the reverse is also true. We are also committed to developing V-Ray RT GPU and one of the nice things is that it is not tied to nVidia. In any case it will be an intersting year for hardware And while I cannot comment on what improvements will or will not be in 3ds Max 2012, I'm confident that V-Ray RT GPU will still be useful.

Best regards,
Vlado

I though about how my post would be received ever since I walked away. I did not mean to suggest that ChaosGroup was going to be made obsolete by advancements in other technologies. In fact, my view of the history of 3ds Max suggests the following: 3ds Max was originally a brilliant piece of software from Autodesk (Kinetix) by taking CAD to the next step and adding the ability to animate. From the very beginning, 3rd party developers were working with the platform and improving it (Blur studios and Havok, for instance, in the mid 1990s adding raytracing ability and reactor, and later Mental Images' Mental Ray), many of which were incorporated by Autodesk into the base package along with their own developments (Maxscript, photometric lighting, etc).

More recently, Autodesk's expansion of the package to include features that 3rd parties and separate software packages have become famous for (such as node based compositing by The Foundry and Eyeon, texture painting and geometry sculpting by Right Hemisphere, Maxon, and Pixologic) are nice developments, but they have really done nothing to unseat Zbrush, Nuke, Fusion, etc from their positions as industry leaders. They have, however, continued to aquire 3rd party plugins and incorporate them as part of the base package (most recently, creative-3D's CAT). In doing so, it only strengthens the 3rd party market motivation to advance their technology, and gives the plugin devs more muscle to work with, short of requiring purchasers to purchase a bunch of other software to make it work (mental ray integration allowed e-on's vue xstream to be a reality that required no additional rendering purchases...and they have recently added Vray compatibility as the only other compatible rendering software, so that says something for Vray!). Mostly, though, those added features simply allows users who don't have access to the 3rd party apps to have a taste of what those apps offer

nVidia's marriage to autodesk is clearly nVidia's way of furthering its long term goal of ultimate diversification -- bridging the divide between CPU processing and GPU processing and gaining the market share of that new super computing industry. The divide between the quadro cards and the geforce cards is the perfect example. Same chip, but big limitations are placed on the chip in the gaming cards (FP64 outright disabled on most of the MP's). Having a GPU rendering app was necessary to generate more buzz about its Tesla cards. Thus, iray provides GPU rendering, but I believe it is, at the moment, secondary to being another forum for showing off nVidia's technology. For every government application requiring 1,000 tesla M2070 cards, that is 100,000 less geforce cards they need to peddle to weed smokin', cheetos eating, mountain dew drinking gamers. Of course, they will take that money all day long too

Point is, ChaosGroup has long been dedicated to this very goal, and that work will continue to make 3rd party rendering solutions a demand of artists. There are other popular rendering engines, such as Final Render (Cebas will be releasing a GPU based rendering solution soon), and Brazil (interestingly, Splutterfish was formed by the guys who originally pioneered raytracing in 3ds Max -- Blur studios -- as mentioned above). But Vray is consistently the most popular -- which is why I noted that E-on has vray as the only other renderer that is compatible with vue xstream), and Vray was the first to make an interactive renderer, and the first to make an interactive GPU renderer.

So despite what others ultimately create, and what is ultimately incorporated into 3ds max, I feel confident that the developers at ChaosGroup will stay ahead of the curve, push the limitations of the software further, and provide features not available elsewhere...which is exemplified by the guys from Splutterfish, who went on to form that company and design Brazil even after Autodesk incorporated their raytracing program from Blur.

[dpmitchell]

Oh, and Vlado...how can Vray RT be used as a production renderer? I did not see that ability in the beta version, unless you mean manually saving each frame as it renders?