Reversed Vray versus Corona rant

[kosso_olli]

It is also so simple to optimize it's crazy, I mean all you really need to adjust is the Noise limit combined with the V-Ray denoiser and you can dial it in exactly where you need to be quality vs frame time.

And people on Facebook, Youtube and Instagram still mock V-Ray for being overly complex, needing lots of time to tweak. This might have been a valid argument 4 years ago, but it's not anymore. It is hard to get out of the heads of people, though.

[M.Max]

This was about a year ago now but it made me realize that people are just not aware of the current amazing state of V-Ray, I hope the news can be shouted way louder because V-Ray deserves the crown now more than ever.

Exactly!
I can't count how many times I talk artsits that using Vray and they aren't aware of IPR existence in Vray and still in the age of subdivs tweaking ..it is frustrating really ..they tell me that they have tried RT years back and it crashed so they give up ..thinking both are the same!

[Vizioen]

Exactly!
I can't count how many times I talk artsits that using Vray and they aren't aware of IPR existence in Vray and still in the age of subdivs tweaking ..it is frustrating really ..they tell me that they have tried RT years back and it crashed so they give up ..thinking both are the same!

Well those artists should quit, because part of being a 3D artist is keeping up with the technology.

[Nicinus]

Personally I think Vray should be the mothership that incorporates all or most of the significant tools of Corona as well. You really shouldn't have to choose between two tools from the same vendor in terms of functionality. It makes perfect sense that Corona is less cluttered and more straightforward to use, and perhaps a test bench for more artistic approaches, but that is not a reason for Vray to omit features such as the material preview, material library, multi region render and of course light mix. I understand it is said light mix is coming, but since the new VFB2 has been on the table for almost three years it doesn't really matter until it is available, does it. Now, having been in the software industry myself, I understand that it is painful and certainly annoying to have users pressing for features, but with tools like Corona (and Maxwell) having offered this for years, and interactive solutions like Lumion getting better, it would be at least great to hear that it is coming relatively shortly.

[Neilg]

With vrays huge focus on interactive rendering, doesnt that then negate the need for a light mixer?

You should never do your final renders with a light mixer on as it's essentially rendering each light group independently, massively slowing down renders - so already it's only for in-development scenes.
Being able to edit live and see a solid preview within a couple of seconds seems more valuable to me than a render that takes 4x as long as it should in order to allow me to drag a slider around. Might be more fun moving the sliders, but it's a very arch-viz focused request (dont think anyone in film is asking for this) and probably better to focus development efforts on a feature which really benefits every industry using vray.

[^Lele^]

What could be shared has been shared, and more will be as there will be a chance to.
The core team (other ports have their own teams, fear not.) has been working *flat out* for a good while now, and while i appreciate everyone will have their own views of the work being done on V-Ray, and what the priorities should be, i also think very few people really know the amount of actual work which is needed to get any given feature out of the door.
That, to me, deserves a bit more than summary comparisons and undue pressure.
My 2 cents as a user, rather than a ChaosGroup employee (make of this what you wish, of course.).

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Redshift is great but the optimization takes way longer in that all the samples are tweak-able separately which looks good on paper but ultimately takes way longer bumping samples

Ya, but unfortunately spoiled by hobbyists and a crazy toxic community.
Redshift's biggest issue is that it uses local samples per lights/materials/GI/SSS/reflection/refraction..etc just like what we used to do in Vray prior to 3.3.. This was 4 odd years ago
Optimizing scenes in Redshift is very technical, scene dependent and requires a lot of time, or else you will end up with noise or super sampling(again like what we used to do in Vray 3.2 and earlier)
I have seen how this sampling workflow confuse users, many people don't touch local samples at all, wasting a lot of potential speed of this engine.
In Vray GPU, the only setting you touch is noise threshold to control quality/render time. There is no such thing as dealing with noise guide in Vray
Another issue with Redshift is IPR, it ignores all sampling settings and doesn't use any kind of adaptivity.. Point cloud SSS will render as raytraced SSS in IPR and results will not match what you get with buckets.
Redshift is limited to 8 GPUs per machine, and trace depth limit of 16.. Vray GPU can use up to 256 and can use as many GPUs as your OS can recognize.
Using domelight for HDRI lighting you will need to use very high sampling (up to 4k for your domelight) ,using portals for HDRI lighting is faster, but you will never be able to get sharp shadows like what other engines can achieve
Vray Next GPU has Hybird rendeirng, NVlink support, Mappable radius for Vray dirt, GGX tail falloff, VRscans support, stochastic flakes and many other features that RS doesn't have.

[zero-13]

And people on Facebook, Youtube and Instagram still mock V-Ray for being overly complex, needing lots of time to tweak. This might have been a valid argument 4 years ago, but it's not anymore. It is hard to get out of the heads of people, though.

So true!

Even back in the day, peoples complaints about V-Ray's complexity gave me a headache, in that none of those people never ever setup V-Ray presets, and half of them clearly have never used it. I mean I had only two presets I created at work back in the day: LQ for fast previewing and HQ for finals, there was very minimal tweaking happening ever between those two extremes unless animation was required.

But some grumpy guss types favorite hobby is complaining about subjects they only have cursory knowledge of or marginal experience with, I think maybe it makes them feel superior/important ... or you have those people that go with what what their cousin Chewie said because he lives in Seattle, it halfsies vegan, and went to Comic Con once dressed up as Captain Planet. (I love Captain Planet, so I can say this)

I hope the new marketing team can get all the support they need to get current visual examples of V-Ray's awesomeness in front of the eyes of as many people as possible, and turn down some of the squawking of the ill informed.

[zero-13]

Exactly!
I can't count how many times I talk artsits that using Vray and they aren't aware of IPR existence in Vray and still in the age of subdivs tweaking ..it is frustrating really ..they tell me that they have tried RT years back and it crashed so they give up ..thinking both are the same!

Precisely this!

I've heard the V-Ray RT thing and how people tried to use it while running a modded "Sound-Blaster" card as a GPU and they saw sparks behind their workstation, and now the supply closet in the hallway is haunted so they "don't do that anymore!" lol.

It's frustrating because you wish you could just instantly show them how great V-Ray is and eliminate that inaccurate perception.

[zero-13]

Ya, but unfortunately spoiled by hobbyists and a crazy toxic community.
Redshift's biggest issue is that it uses local samples per lights/materials/GI/SSS/reflection/refraction..etc just like what we used to do in Vray prior to 3.3.. This was 4 odd years ago

Yes sir!

This is exactly what I thought when I started with Redshift, luckily I have that samples optimization experience from past V-Ray days... but Gee-Whiz, does it take a lot of tweaking.

Goes like this: Region IPR to compare noisy initial render, bump light samples to 512, tweak some more, "I hope that's enough?" --> "Nope need to bump up refraction samples x2 to 1024 now because glass is still grainy" --> "Maybe now?" --> "Nope need to bump GI bounces to 2048 samples " --> "Finally mostly clean, but still two minutes slower and a bit grainier than my V-Ray scene" --> "Sigh"

[Muhammed_Hamed]

About Vray's marketing, their Demo videos of new releases are very well done! I appreciate the time they put into these videos, it does speak for itself
Then there is usually a live stream with live Q/A, they post it on Youtube after few days.
Take a look at this for example on Vray for Maya release
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EuSLeUHvvs
all scenes are spot on really and demonstrate the point.
Now compare to Otoy's Demo about Octane 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xE3J56pabk
A presentation from high school student would look better really, and bullshit examples on the denoiser or the AI lights..
I would love more work on Vray GPU page, specially about how easy Vray's sampling is or NVlink support that other renderers don't have yet.

[zero-13]

About Vray's marketing, their Demo videos of new releases are very well done! I appreciate the time they put into these videos, it does speak for itself
Then there is usually a live stream with live Q/A, they post it on Youtube after few days.
Take a look at this for example on Vray for Maya release
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EuSLeUHvvs
all scenes are spot on really and demonstrate the point.
Now compare to Otoy's Demo about Octane 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xE3J56pabk
A presentation from high school student would look better really, and bullshit examples on the denoiser or the AI lights..
I would love more work on Vray GPU page, specially about how easy Vray's sampling is or NVlink support that other renderers don't have yet.

Great example here, that Otoy video is not very exciting at all, makes me sleepy.

No doubt Chaos Group has an awesome marketing team, their work is super polished and so pro, so I hope it does not sound like I'm disparaging the team at all, they are awesome!

I think mainly I feel like I see tons of Octane, Redshift chatter and comments on Twitter, and Insta etc., compared to V-Ray that I wish I could balance that out more or be able to increase the volume on V-Ray.

Maybe it's up to the V-Ray community to show the awesomeness and spread the word more on the social medias to help support the marketing team.

I compare it to the VHS Betamax battle, the cheaper lower quality format won out in the end and that makes me sad, as I wish the world would strive for the best or most optimal thing vs short sighted greed for the sake of profit, meanwhile the masses get the lesser product and we all sort of stand in place or are artificially held back rather than progress. .

V-Ray is actually better/faster rendering solution in numerous ways, and is the most complete, feature rich, and production proven rendering engine, not perceptually but actually, and you have the option to go CPU or GPU... I'm not sure what other render engines have half of what V-Ray brings to the table in capability, if it were another engine I'd be saying that about it, but as we sit here now it's V-Ray all the way.

[^Lele^]

I think mainly I feel like I see tons of Octane, Redshift chatter and comments on Twitter, and Insta etc., compared to V-Ray that I wish I could balance that out more or be able to increase the volume on V-Ray.

I half-joke about this saying our users don't post publicly as much, as they have paid work to be done. ^^
Jokes aside, the internet -and social media at that- is not very good a meter to judge the intrinsic quality of a product (that can be had only through rigorous, extensive, personal testing, i opine.), nor really the diffusion/market share for each: a few vocal ones could sway the perception either way, and wildly so, while never getting near the real numbers.
I wholly agree on the quality of the demo material the 3D department produces for marketing: generally super pretty, and precisely on point. The release of said material is always an event i look forward to.

[Muhammed_Hamed]

so I hope it does not sound like I'm disparaging the team at all, they are awesome!

Chaos considers our feedback, which is very nice and part of why most of us here take the time to write about our thoughts at all.. Feel free to reach out to them if you have suggestions/thoughts/constructive criticism

I think mainly I feel like I see tons of Octane, Redshift chatter and comments on Twitter, and Insta etc., compared to V-Ray that I wish I could balance that out more or be able to increase the volume on V-Ray.

Depends on the industry, Archvis is all about Vray and Corona on all social media. It also depends on where you stick around
The only industry where Octane/RS dominate is motion design and Mograph(C4D), so most likely you are focused on this community
Thankfully at the end of last year, Chaos Group bought back C4D's bridge, but no rush at all.. Make Vray for C4D great again
This is Vray's GPU group on Facebook, you will see many cool works be Dabarti, Andre Matos, Ian Springs, Vedat Afuzi and others
https://www.facebook.com/groups/VRayRT/

Maybe it's up to the V-Ray community to show the awesomeness and spread the word more on the social medias to help support the marketing team.

Maybe true for Vray GPU, still debatable though. Overall I see works by Vray more than any other renderers, VWartclub, CG record ,Evermotion and all others

I compare it to the VHS Betamax battle, the cheaper lower quality format won out in the end and that makes me sad

Not even close :P
90% of the Archvis industry relies on Vray/Corona.. Vray is an industry standard in every major production house in the VFX industry. MPC, scanline VFX, blur and others
Game of thrones, Avengers, Pacific rim and many other big titles has been all rendered by Vray You are not landing a shading/lighting job in this industry without Vray
Chaos Group is selling licenses more than anyone else by miles, this is a fact.. And probably part of how Vray is ahead on features/updates, with over 60 engineers/devs working on Vray

unfortunately spoiled by hobbyists and a crazy toxic community

Back to my quote here, you cannot really have a civil discussion on Redshift's group without losing brain cells. quality of any discussions there has been just bad
And they go as far as deleting any post I reply to.. not just my replies
The admins there like to bash Vray in every post. feels like their cryptonite and when I ask about example scenes or show them my testing they delete the post
The kind of toxicity I talk about, http://community.foundry.com/discuss...roblems?page=1
He deleted his account/replies but you get the idea

[zero-13]

Muhammed_Hamed This makes me feel better!

You got it exactly right, it's very true, I have been less following the Archvis community for the last several years and have been a bit more focused on the Mograph, Gaming, VFX and Ad side of the CG pond.

I still would like to nuke the entire site from orbit as far as marketing and increasing V-Ray's user base, it's the only way to be sure.