Fr s-1 2.0 for max announced VRay from Cebas :D

[Morbid Angel]

percy I guess I have to agree that vray can be a peach sometimes too. With respects to pflow, or some other anomalies. But having said that, pflow rendering or 3rd party plugin rendering is not really what vray is designed for. Yes it can do this, but since such things are complex maths from outside you cant expect a full on support for them. Look at mental ray and particles, in eather max or maya. Its terrible and can barely render a thing. What Im talking about, stability wise, if for example in maya mental ray, or max mr for that matter, if you assign a certain shader to faces, mr wont render it. Some other shaders break light links for no reason and so on. This is directly renderers fault, and it takes countless hours to try and solve this from user end. This is what I refer to when Im talking about vray stability.

[joconnell]

Heya Dmitri,

Since I stuck in the pflow comment I'll have to chime in on this one. I moved company from a 3dsmax to an xsi house in September last year and I've done nothing but particle fx jobs since that since it's one thing that xsi has a weakness in. I've hammered max, pflow and vray on nearly every job since that in a lot of cases on jobs that were very retail based - not nice or impressive ads by any means but challenging for a program in terms of dataset or memory handling. I used vray since it has a far quicker material and lighting setup than anything else and gets me the pictures I want with a short setup time. That said I have had a lot of crashes during renders at the preparation stage. This could be down to 3dsmax being a heap of crap (I love it and I'm not going to change but that doesn't mean it's perfect) or the fact that they let go the developer of the particle system I've used a huge amount or it could be down to vray or my system setup. Either way i've had crashes setting of vray renders so it's not 100% solid. That said it's still light years ahead of anything else I've used so far and by the way vlado and peter have worked over the past while in improving and fixing things, I'd back it to keep in front of every render for quite some time.

From what I've seen of your work, it's tv based effects so in a lot of senses quite similar to the work I mainly do which is visual fx for commercials - both lower res than film work and less demanding in terms of quality, but more intense in terms of turn around time and inventiveness. It's very valid work in terms of what a renderer should do but I think it's over stepping the mark to dismiss anyone on that basis until you've done huge stuff on the scale of digital domain and be resolute that something is 100% solid. They're still using it which means it must be very bloody good in the first place but you don't see them jumping in saying it's faultless. You've done some great work in vray and it's obvious it suits you perfectly from what you say - you've put the hours into learning it and are getting the results you want from it and that's fantastic. But that's not everyone. That's your experience of it and more power to you for it - it means you can get the shots you need done reliably on time and get home to your wife or friends afterwards - can't ask more than that

I'm by no means the be all and end all of knowledge in the 3dsmax world, I just know that what works for me now might not get me what I want in another case. My work is very quick, messy and in no way ideal - hearing about the speedshape job for saab where they had 3 compositors and 3-4 3d guys on hand for 7-8 weeks only was nuts - at the moment i'm working on a very big fx job and there's me, an xsi guy using mental ray for his elements, and one flame op for the last two weeks of the job - i've no choice but to use whatever gets the result quickest for me with the best result - it isn't the right way to do things most of the time but I have to go for the result every time or else it doesn't get done. on the current ad, it means ditching pflow for thinking particles since it's far better, but on the next job it might be something totally different - i've rarely come across something that's been perfect for every job.

All that said though, vray is the main reason i'm sticking with max at the moment - it gives me better output quicker than anything else for what I do, and I haven't seen anyone as open and helpful in helping people with problems or bug fixes ad I'm more inclined to stick with them as a result.

Cheers!

John

[Morbid Angel]

joconnell I dont quite understand what you are saying regarding pflow and vray? what I ment was that yes vray has issues with pflow. Pflow inside of max has issues on its own. Imo very underworked system.

P.S. nothing is really 100% solid. But its just my opinion and my experience that vray has been great, stable and so on, in respects to anything else out there...Yes vray does crash, yes it has issues too. I dont see where this is going...

[Paul Oblomov]

I'm sure we can relax a lil when VRay Standalone appear Of course, max/xsi/maya exporters-translators should be available right after vr.sa release.

Vlado - is there anything new on this project ? Maybe some screenies

[vlado]

Well, screen-shots of the standalone are not very exciting As for the Maya version, it is already available to anyone interested, and it includes an exporter for the standalone - anything that V-Ray can render in Maya, can be rendered outside of Maya with the standalone. An exporter script for 3dsmax will be included in the next rc build of V-Ray; the XSI version is progressing quickly too. The standalone is currently supported on Windows, Linux and OSX; V-Ray for Maya works on Windows and Linux (OSX being worked on).

Best regards,
Vlado

[RErender]

In case you need a reason for when to release the next RC, April 25th is my B-Day

[joconnell]

the XSI version is progressing quickly too.

Very good news.

[jacksc02]

good news all round!

A monthly update of development might be a nice thng to post up, keep all the fanboys happy

[DaForce]

and bitching for updates.
Sometimes a little darkness is a good thing.