Question about Vray Standalone

[jpenguin]

Wow a reply from Vlado Thanks!

A couple more questions.

Do you think vray stand alone will be able to handle scene with strange mental ray nodes?

This is the case we're having right now actually. Our rigs are provided from another studio and they already have quite a lot of mental ray nodes connected in ways we can't really figure out. When referencing/importing these characters into Maya we got tons of errors about mental ray connections. These scenes would render fine using mental ray if open in Maya first and render from the GUI, but fail completely trying to render with command line. Sometimes we get message that maya batch crashes, sometimes it says Maya exit with code 210, 211.

[vlado]

1. Is Vray Standalone included with Vray for Maya (or for other applications) or is it a separate purchase altogether?

It is included with V-Ray for Maya. One V-Ray for Maya license comes bundled with 10 render licenses for V-Ray Standalone. You can also purchase the standalone separately if needed.

2. What file can the stand alone use? Can it accept Maya ma/mb file or will I need to export/convert my scene?

It only understands .vrscene files, which can be exported with the V-Ray for Maya plugin.

3. For the same scene set up, is there any performance boost using stand alone V.S. standard Maya command line rendering with Vray for Maya as its engine?

There is no difference in the render speed, but the standalone uses less memory to render. This is because running Maya itself, even if only in batch mode, already takes a certain amount of RAM. Further on, when rendering inside Maya, some of the render data is duplicated once in the Maya scene, and once for V-Ray. These problems are avoided when rendering with the standalone version of V-Ray.

Best regards,
Vlado

[jpenguin]

Couple questions. Hope this is not the wrong section for it. I am a Maya user so I thought I'd ask this here

1. Is Vray Standalone included with Vray for Maya (or for other applications) or is it a separate purchase altogether?

2. What file can the stand alone use? Can it accept Maya ma/mb file or will I need to export/convert my scene?

3. For the same scene set up, is there any performance boost using stand alone V.S. standard Maya command line rendering with Vray for Maya as its engine?