Has anyone tested arnorld vs vray ?

[Paul Oblomov]

Won't it be affecting something, that reflects it ?

[vlado]

Won't it be affecting something, that reflects it ?

Yes? I thought that's what you meant by 'glossy depth'... I seem to remember reading in some siggraph paper that Arnold reduces the glossiness of surfaces that are seen in reflections in order to reduce the noise. I thought that's what you wanted to get?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Paul Oblomov]

I mean this. I'm not that technical than you

Glossy depth
The maximum number of times a ray can be glossily reflected.

[vlado]

So why don't you change the reflection depth of the material then? Or just the global reflection depth?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morbid Angel]

Actually I did an extensive comparison with arnold, and guess what, the render time is almost the same as vray. Actually in my test vray was faster by a little bit.

Vlado I believe arnold does use adaptive sampling.

[jasonhuang1115]

Actually I did an extensive comparison with arnold, and guess what, the render time is almost the same as vray. Actually in my test vray was faster by a little bit.

How about the quality in terms of noise in your comparison where Vray is somewhat faster?

[Morbid Angel]

I think in both arnold and vray we had acceptable noise levels, meaning there was no visible noise in the image. I will post some test images if I find them.

[jasonhuang1115]

I think in both arnold and vray we had acceptable noise levels, meaning there was no visible noise in the image. I will post some test images if I find them.

Great! Look forward to the test images.

[tylerART]

I have a bit of experience using Arnold and I wanted to put in my 2 cents to some of the previous comments on this thread. Arnold is not an adaptive renderer, or so says their dev team. Every pixel is sampled at the same rate, and every pixel is sampled at a squared rate, therefore 2 samples =4, 4=16, 8=64 samples, etc.

I'm a huge fan of VRay, but in all my tests, Arnold's MC GI is clearly MUCH faster than VRays is. I've done some side by side comparisons in the past I can dig up if anyone is interested. Arnold doesn't have any caching options for GI, so in a side by side test, often VRay comes out on top speed wise when using Irradiance Mapping, but this isn't a fair comparison, as in VRay you have to fix flicker, and caching options aren't accurate as you often have to smooth cached GI. This takes time to do, and I would take the slightly higher render times not to have to do this step. The problem is, MCGI is much slower in VRay even when you add in your time working with the cached GI.



Vlado, if you can really optimize brute force MC rendering, I would LOVE to see this in a future release. I'm so tired of cached GI options, and I think this is the one leg up Arnold has over VRay.

[vlado]

You'll have to look out for V-Ray 3.0 then

Best regards,
Vlado

[joconnell]

I'm a huge fan of VRay, but in all my tests, Arnold's MC GI is clearly MUCH faster than VRays is.

I'd well believe that at the minute - I used arnold for max back 10 years ago and it was a very simple renderer. Everything was pure raytracing with no shortcuts so everything was just a matter of grain. Marcoss was a believer in using nothing but good maths. Vlado's also mentioned in other posts that there's optimisations in the current code that could speed things up by around 25% apparently? With that and the vast array of options you currently have it's a very flexible and fast renderer.

I get your point about caching tyler - it's very nice to be able to render a frame, and if you know that the noise is at an acceptable level that you can happily render a sequence and not have any flickering going on. To have monte carlo on a par with Arnold will be great for animated characters and vfx stuff, but to have the other options for matte painting, set building and arch vis stuff as well is going to be hard to beat. Light cache is a revelation for filling in a volume of light with such little fuss.

I haven't tested the current arnold yet so I'd be interested in how flexible it is at problem solving and how it's pass management is by comparison to vray - the render elements and frame buffer have given me a lot of feedback to make better and quicker decisions sooo once you know what you're doing you can get great results predictably. I'd imagine arnold is still quite artist friendly in that it's got a minimum of controls so it's easy to learn. If I have one criticism of vray it's often the variety of methods and options, and the documentation that goes along with them. Options give you a lot of flexibility but they can often be a bit overwhelming to a new user. Thankfully between the chaos guys and the forum users we're getting some nice approaches and methods - the simpler the better!

[vlado]

Options give you a lot of flexibility but they can often be a bit overwhelming to a new user. Thankfully between the chaos guys and the forum users we're getting some nice approaches and methods - the simpler the better!

I hear you That's another thing that we want to improve for 3.0. It's a hard task though - reducing complexity but at the same time giving all the options that you need. I think we have a way to do this now, but we'll see...

Best regards,
Vlado

[Neilg]

I think you should make it more complicated - dont even bother having buttons to do anything, have a blank textbox. make users code their own features.
vray 5 should just be a maths textbook and a ring binder of research papers.

[joconnell]

I hear you That's another thing that we want to improve for 3.0. It's a hard task though - reducing complexity but at the same time giving all the options that you need. I think we have a way to do this now, but we'll see...

Best regards,
Vlado

As cubicle is alluding to above, vray is very rewarding once mastered. You've given the users a very good bag of tricks to cover a lot of different situations, maybe it's more of a support manual issue? A lot of the documentation is done in a very dictionary / scientific style which will give a definition of what a parameter is but maybe not a very artist friendly, intuitive understanding of it.

[jasonhuang1115]

Speaking of documentation. Here is Arnold's web-based doc. https://support.solidangle.com/dashboard.action
I like the design and how the information is laid out.