Vue6-Xstream / vray / mentalray ?

[tom schuelke]

Hi everybody.

We think about buying vue6 for large environements as a new part of our renerpipeline for architectural animations.

now what i have seen is, that vue 6 xstream works together with mentalray.

now in animations, vray does render incremental irradiancemaps, that alow flickerfree animations and very smal i-map prerendertimes.

now what i wished "Vlado ", was that vue would be able to plugin vray as a hostrenderer.

otherwise, i ask my self if mentalray is able to produce comparable incremental prerendert irradiancemap-like solutions.

cause rendering huge animations with gi solutions frame by frame is a pain in the ... if you know what i mean.

so any ideas ?

Tom

[Morbid Angel]

I would have to say that vray most likely will not work with vue. We have vue 6 extreme, we use it for the same purpose you have described. Its a big pain in the ass to get it to render on the farm. It comes with special mental ray translators/shaders which hookup to maya/mr.
So I think its mostly upto vue guys to implement vray support, not the other way around.
About irradience maps, mr cant reproduce the same iradience map quality/flexibility as vray. It will be a while before it can, if at all.

[percydaman]

we also tried vue for same purposes. Vue does a good job at whats its intended for. Though is slow as all get out. We just couldn't get it properly integrated with max and vray. Just getting a camera imported into vue was a headache. We gave up pretty quickly. We then created and exported trees and foliage from vue for use in max. But its huge amounts of opacity maps made vray croak.

[mmikee]

otherwise, i ask my self if mentalray is able to produce comparable incremental prerendert irradiancemap-like solutions.

In max 9, the FG solution workflow is alot like vray's IR map. Saving a
multiframe inc solution is very simple. As far as Vue xstream goes,
we have it here, and it works pretty well with max 9/mental ray. But as
already posted, it is slow.

Regards,
Mike

[Morbid Angel]

Im a bit outdated on mr in max, but I hear that thought i has a function for irradience map perframe cache its still ways away from one in vray.

[mmikee]

Im mental ray 3.5 it is simple.
You check save file for FG and choose name/location. Set nth frame. Calc the lighting. The FG only adds samples where it is needed in the next frame. Then check the freeze option and render the animation. The only real difference in workflow for me is that there isnt a way to not render the final image when calc the lighting. But, you can simply change the image sampling to 1/64 1/64, and dont save the image. This way the actual rendered frame only takes a couple of seconds.
From a workflow standpoint, it is very similar to my workflow in Vray.

Regards,
Mike

[Morbid Angel]

i see. But does it have irradience maps for animation like vray ?

[mmikee]

i see. But does it have irradience maps for animation like vray ?

I am not sure I follow you. I use the workflow described above for animation. I am certainly not making a judgement between the two
renderers, just pointing out the workflow is similar for calc nth frame lighting for animation.
We use both renderers here daily.

BTW... Great stuff on you website. Beautiful work.

Regards,
Mike

[Morbid Angel]

no worries, I was being a bit sarcastic. What I ment was, yes vray and mr now have support for irradience map for animations, for camera flythroughs. New vray however will have support for animation of irradience maps with deforming geometry which is a big deal imo.

[mmikee]

New vray however will have support for animation of irradience maps with deforming geometry which is a big deal imo.

I got you now. That will be sweet.

Regards,
Mike

[aphex79]

From vue forum:

Hi Robert,

we indeed have plans to support V-ray, however, nothing was decided in terms of when as of today.
We hope to be able to start vRay compatibility pretty soon.


Best regards.
Matt River

[DaForce]

now THAT will be cool.

[studioDIM]

Unless, that is, they'll just whack the plants in with loads of opacity maps...
Let's hope they'll try some cleverer way to integrate it...

Lele

[vlado]

On the subject of V-Ray irradiance map vs mental ray FG: there are some differences:

1) Adaptive sampling: the irradiance map in V-Ray is adaptive (e.g. is will place more samples around details etc). This is not so for mental ray - you define a fixed resolution for presampling of FG and it will stick to it, resulting in a blurry solution. This is particularly obvious for contact shadows.

2) Interpolation - V-Ray has a more sophisticated algorithm to reconstruct the irradiance, especially on curved surfaces and near shadow transitions, producing results that are very close to the actual GI solution, with fewer irradiance samples.

In general, FG in mental ray produces a rather blurred GI solution, practically requiring an AO pass to add some of the lost detail back in.

Of course, these may or may not be important differences. I have no doubt that mental ray will cover these too at some point, but it's not there yet.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morbid Angel]

On the subject of V-Ray irradiance map vs mental ray FG: there are some differences:

1) Adaptive sampling: the irradiance map in V-Ray is adaptive (e.g. is will place more samples around details etc). This is not so for mental ray - you define a fixed resolution for presampling of FG and it will stick to it, resulting in a blurry solution. This is particularly obvious for contact shadows.

2) Interpolation - V-Ray has a more sophisticated algorithm to reconstruct the irradiance, especially on curved surfaces and near shadow transitions, producing results that are very close to the actual GI solution, with fewer irradiance samples.

In general, FG in mental ray produces a rather blurred GI solution, practically requiring an AO pass to add some of the lost detail back in.

Of course, these may or may not be important differences. I have no doubt that mental ray will cover these too at some point, but it's not there yet.

Best regards,
Vlado

exectly what I ment... exept well explained