The Future

[glorybound]

Maybe I just got spooked Maybe I should double think posting so late in the night.

I have spent the past three days trying to get a clean render in a reasonable time, so this is my biggest need. When you have a large scene with a hundred lights and a hundred materials, and something all of a sudden goes wrong with a deadline looming, you feel pretty lost. Time after time, things are going well and render times are good, and something breaks. This time, after a dozen successful test renders, I had to replace the sun/sky to get things running again. All of as sudden, after tweaking a V-Ray settings, I started getting bazaar spots. I would put the setting right back to when it was good, but it wasn't good anymore. It can take many hours to find out what happened. In this case, I did nothing to the sun/sky, so I had no reason to question it being the culprit to the spots. As far as I know all render engines have these issues and V-Ray might be better than most, but when I hear all these problems go away with an engine like Corona, my interest is peaked. Who knows, it might just be a user issue.

[vlado]

but when I hear all these problems go away with an engine like Corona

More often than not, they get replaced with different kinds of problems. But if you are having issues, you should tell us about them - otherwise, we wouldn't know to fix them.

Best regards,
Vlado

[glorybound]

Yes, you guys are always great about helping. However, under deadline there is no time to stop, upload, and send the file. Like this one, I have it fixed so now I am just rushing to get the image to the client. Maybe next time I'll do a save as when it is in a broken state and send it when I have time.

More often than not, they get replaced with different kinds of problems. But if you are having issues, you should tell us about them - otherwise, we wouldn't know to fix them.

Best regards,
Vlado

[flino2004]

Every engine has its niche, Vray is very popular and I've seen more ads requesting designers with experience in vray... It's almost an standard at least in architectural visualization and others fields for sure... Like most of you here, we invested a lot time, money and more working with max+vray ( I have licenses of finalrender , maxwell, fry render, octane) ... And the reason besides being an excellent engine to be with Vray is the support, in the same way I use forest pack because itoosoft has the same philosophy.
I personally think that vray is always ahead of the game and if something new comes Chaosgroup will find the way to implement it quick for all of us..... My only preoccupation is Autodesk, they have the resources to get any company in the industry and kill them as they please.

[Pixelcon]

IMO vray is easier and more stable than ever. I'm working on a monster file with over 300 lights, 1000s of proxies and over 4gb of imported geometry and vray is rendering surprisingly fast and isn't breaking a sweat.

This min shading rate feature is so good.

[peterguthrie]

yep, i trust vray to handle pretty much anything you can throw at it.

[chrischan]

Vray never left me alone on close deadlines. It was always this buggy 3dsmax!

[Jiri.Matys]

glorybound: Maybe you have some standard materials and other default max materials, which work with vray, but in big scenes can make a lot of trouble and bad renderings. Lot of objects you can buy has that materials so you have to clean it!

[glorybound]

I have gotten really good about keeping a clean scene. I run the V-Ray material converter and a few scene check scripts.

glorybound: Maybe you have some standard materials and other default max materials, which work with vray, but in big scenes can make a lot of trouble and bad renderings. Lot of objects you can buy has that materials so you have to clean it!

[Companioncube]

have you upgraded to vray 3 bobby?

[glorybound]

Yes. I have been on V3 for a little over a month.

[3LP]

IMO vray is easier and more stable than ever. I'm working on a monster file with over 300 lights, 1000s of proxies and over 4gb of imported geometry and vray is rendering surprisingly fast and isn't breaking a sweat.

This min shading rate feature is so good.

I really need to get this min shading rate sinked in.
All those different way (new?) since V3 has left me confused :

Before we had the universal settings,
After we had to rise subdivs as per GW method,
After we had to un-check the divide subdivs and keep the subdiv low,
After we had use the progressive renderer,
After we had to use the min max AA low and use the min shading rate,
After we had Lele throwing some complicated math and scripts that would automate everything but with strange settings,
After we needed to evaluate where the noise was in the image to asses min and max values and use the min shading rate,
After we have the global multiplier to 0 to make a trick (that I still don't know what it does),
After ...

I have most certainly forgotten a bunch of other reasons/theory/conspiracy of what should be the best solution/settings to render,

But after all that, I'm still not sure how to use each of them, everyone goes on with this or that setting being magic one.
When trying to optimize I can really make my render times grinding to a halt.
And while trying to optimize my scene, it can take me so much more time than if I have let it render in the first place...

So I revert to the settings I know, as this get me the job done, but I'm often frustrated as I know I could potentially have thing done faster with the right settings, specially when I see ppl around me screaming everywhere that this or that setting is so much better.
So when I can, tend to use Vray RT GPU, it's so much faster and it ditch all those annoying setting and it feels more like corona, although there is a lot of limitations.

Corona on the other hand, even if I agrees isn't faster than Vray and lakes a lot of Vray features, it just works, or at least it seems like you don't have the choice to make it work faster or slower, you don't fiddle around with settings, you just let it go, and I have a better peace of mind when I'm using it.

Stan

[vlado]

It's as complicated as you want it to be... Since a long time ago the only thing I change is the min. shading rate and let it render for as long as it takes - usually not that long.

As for figuring out where the noise comes from, you have to do that with Corona too. Noise and longish render times seem to be a recurring theme on their forum and occasionally you will have to debug your scene to figure what's causing it, same as you have to do with V-Ray. Once you do find the problem, you have to change your scene around it (i.e. change materials or lights), or in extreme cases, simply denoise in post. Rarely, some images also show artifacts from UHD caching and people typically have no idea how to clean them up. V-Ray at least gives you options to clean up the image. But, as I said above, if you feel more comfortable with Corona, by all means use it.

Best regards,
Vlado

[glorybound]

My prediction is, something like Corona will attract a lot of users with its low point of entry; Come on, $29 per month! We'll start seeing a lot of nice work on-line, coming from Corona, and people will flood to it. The market will be flooded with people doing things for cheap, because they live in their mother basement and we'll all be out of work. V-Ray's price tag keeps a lot of people out of the market, but who can't afford $29 per month?

[vlado]

The market will be flooded with people doing things for cheap, because they live in their mother basement and we'll all be out of work. V-Ray's price tag keeps a lot of people out of the market, but who can't afford $29 per month?

While that is a certainly a possibility, I think the probability is a bit on the low side. mental ray is free with 3ds Max; Octane used to be $99 (and not per month). Both are not bad renderers but I don't see a flood coming from either of them. There are other factors than price. If you ever run out of work, it probably won't be because of Corona...

Best regards,
Vlado