Is Vray better?

[trajic]

That question is geared more for arch-viz, but I need to know. I work for a major architectural firm in the US with over 1400 employees. We use Revit and cannot render in "mental ray lite" so we export to max and use mental ray. I have been using vray now for 3 years and the firm has 15 licenses at their disposal. I have a meeting with the principals to explain why I believe vray is faster and more efficient for our rendering need. I am not asking them to buy more seats, they just want us to stop using it and switch to mental ray. I do not believe that should be done, unless revit ever adopts a stronger mental ray package. Is there anything that I can techincally explain to them of why this could be the case? I have done tests with similar settings, materials, and lighting and have always found vray to come out on top with speed by as much as 4x. Am I wrong to assume that? Our viz lab is comprised of mostly animators and they only use MR. They told me vray is alot slower, but when I looked a few months ago, they had the 1.47 version, or the one that had the slow material editor and transforming vertices problem. Now we have 1.5 and they are trying to get rid of it because they do not use it. If anyone can shed some light on this so I can defend my Vray case, I would appreciate it greatly.

thanks, brian

[Morbid Angel]

well I don't work in arch viz that much, but I do work in vfx quite a bit. And I know mental ray as well as vray and closely work with both. There are some things mental ray is better then vray at, but mostly I believe that vray for arch viz anyway can get a better result. The reason today, is that vray has a much stronger and more robust global illumination algorithms which work much better with animation, animated objects and etc. For arch viz, interrior/exterrior renderings this is key, for speed/productivity. New mental ray now comes with irradience particles, but I think that new system still needs refinement and it will be sometime before its fully functional. Also, vray employs a very powerful render pass architecture, which far superior to anything that mental ray has built in a right out of the box package.
My 2 cents anyway.

One other thing to mention is the vray proxy. Quite often used in archviz in my opinion its a great tool. Proxy in mental ray just been introduced and also needs to be refined for a few versions before it works correctly.

[crazy homeless guy]

Also, vray employs a very powerful render pass architecture, which far superior to anything that mental ray has built in a right out of the box package.

Can you explain this in more detail. What exactly does this mean?

[Morbid Angel]

right out of the box, mental ray in 3ds max does not have a way of outputing a g-buffer pass. G-buffer pass system is a way of rendering multiple passes from one render, thus saving time. The difference between this method and rendering each pass individually is of course time of the render per frame, for g-buffer pass is segnificantly faster. As far as I know by default mental ray cannot render such pass in current 3ds max versions. Thats going to change however, judging from maya 2009 where framebuffer pass has been intergrated, however its not refined and needs more work as the other new mental ray features.
You can get framebuffer pass to work with mental ray using custom made shaders, however its complicated somewhat and requires advanced knowledge of the system to get it working. In vray its as easy as few clicks

[sea2stars]

Morbid Angel - How does the support for Mental Ray compare to Vray?

[Morbid Angel]

Morbid Angel - How does the support for Mental Ray compare to Vray?

If you rate support on a scale of 0-10, where 10 is the best support, I'd say vray is close to 10, and mental ray is 1.

Reason for this is simple, when most users complain about mental ray, they actually dont realize that its not mental ray (mental images) fault for the problems they are expiriencing. Rather its the fault of the company who intergrates mental ray in to their packege. In most cases its Autodesk.

[sea2stars]

Hrm. That sounds like a great argument right there; support compared between Vray and MR.

[Morbid Angel]

Hrm. That sounds like a great argument right there; support compared between Vray and MR.

yep. Basically, if you go to mental ray forum, such as lamrug.org, you can get some support there, though its not from autodesk directly, and its just 2-3 guys who know mental ray inside out but, they can be gone for some weeks at a time, and you wont get response as you would with vlado or some one else from chaosgroup who is on top of things at all times.
I mean, autodesk does try to fix problems with mr, and each version of max/maya it releases has 10 page bug fix lists, however, as we know 3ds max gets released once a year or so, and vray gets released a lot more often then that

[3ddesign]

Vray vs. MR

I agree with morbid angel. Vray is a great renderer but the true strength of vray is the people, both at chaos and here in the forum.

[percydaman]

Vray is the defacto standard for rendering in the arch vis world. period. end of story. That should be enough?

[werticus]

isnt mental ray on the same level as scan line... it comes with max :P

[Morbid Angel]

isnt mental ray on the same level as scan line... it comes with max :P

I wouldnt say that autodesk is sure putting a lot of work into it to match vray.

[vlado]

Yes, but, you know, that also means that everyone has mental ray... so nothing special about it.

Best regards,
Vlado

[vlado]

Here is my view on things at this time:

(*) V-Ray has physically accurate lights and materials (the arch&design and ProMaterials based on it are not quite so, neither are the mr area lights, including the light portal); of course, any physical accuracy only goes to a certain extent, but in V-Ray things are a lot closer to what you'd expect;

(*) V-Ray has very efficient image-based lighting tools - the texture-mapped dome light, as well as texture-mapped rectangle lights. This will be extended with true object lights in SP3. There are no equivalents of these features for mental ray.

(*) V-Ray handles a lot of lights better;

(*) V-Ray offers much easier GI setup with the light cache;

(*) GI in V-Ray is typically with much better detail for equivalent render time compared to mental ray (where you are practically forced to use ambient occlusion to get the same kind of detail);

(*) V-Ray offers more and efficient methods for handling animations (both fly-through and moving objects);

(*) The V-Ray shading pipeline supports efficient layering of materials (e.g. with the VRayBlendMtl material) - equivalent materials in mental ray typically render a lot slower; V-Ray also supports faster and more accurate sampling of reflections/hilights from area light sources and IBL.

(*) VRayProxy is still better than the mental ray implementation in terms of handling larger amounts of geometry and handles motion blur for deforming proxies more accurately;

(*) V-Ray has better displacement with more options (e.g. 2d landscape option);

(*) V-Ray still has faster raytraced motion blur.

It is also worth noting the fact that it is mental ray that takes features from V-Ray, not the other way round For example, final gather in mental ray went through several revisions in the recent years, before finally landing on a solution that is remarkably similar to the irradiance map used originally by V-Ray (of course, this particular fact can be said about the other two 3ds Max plugin renderers ); light portals and proxy objects were originally introduced in 3ds Max by V-Ray etc.

At the same, V-Ray also moves forward and there are many new additions planned to make your lives easier...

Best regards,
Vlado

[rivoli]

At the same, V-Ray also moves forward and there are many new additions planned to make your lives easier...

don't know why but this last bit it's kind of my favourite item from the above list