Is Vray better?

[dlparisi]

Here is my view on things at this time:...

Best regards,
Vlado

Support of V-Ray vs. Mental Ray??? You have the developer of vray directly responding to a question, how cool is that? Of course you have to take what he says with a (very small) grain of salt (not saying he's lying, just that there's probably some good things to MR as well) but this is not the first time vlado's been on this forum . He's here constantly answering questions, setting things straight, giving advice and being very generous with patches (if you really need a beta update that fixes something it's usually given). Unbelievable support.

[andreg]

I must agree about v-ray's customer support... Seems like Vlado never sleeps lol

[vlado]

Of course you have to take what he says with a (very small) grain of salt (not saying he's lying, just that there's probably some good things to MR as well)

I did not say mental ray is a bad renderer; on the contrary, it is a very good one - but in the above respects and some others V-Ray is still better.

Best regards,
Vlado

[dlparisi]

Sorry, vlado. I didn't mean to imply anything other than that in your post you were just mentioning the pros of vray without mentioning any pros of MR.

[vlado]

Well, I was following the topic title But, you are right of course, that my opinions are strongly biased.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morbid Angel]

I think what Vlado said is absolute true in respect to advantages of vray over mr. This is without any intent of bashing mr, simply pointing out the obvious.
However I would have to say that some of those points are not true for mr in maya...but thats another story

[Morbid Angel]

Here is my view on things at this time:

(*) 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;
Best regards,
Vlado

Vlado, if you have few minutes, could you make an example vray scene which can demonstrate this advantage over mr, relating to layered materials. In mr I have never came accross such issue.

[vlado]

mr has to calculate lighting for each material separately from the rest; so if you have e.g. a Blend material with two glossy sub-materials, the lighting will be calculated twice for each sub-material. If you have lots of lights, this will be quite a lot of extra work. Add three layers, and it becomes even more.

This is not the case with V-Ray, where lighting is calculated just once for the entire material and for all layers at the same time.

Let me try to make a quick test...

Best regards,
Vlado

[vlado]

So here you go. If you look at this link:

http://www.spot3d.com/vray/images/stuff/mr_vr_layered/

you will find rendered two variations of the same scene - one is a single horizontal plane, and the other has a teapot added. Each scene is rendered in two versions - one is with a single diffuse material (Arch&Design for mental ray, VRayMtl for V-Ray), the other is with a Blend material (VRayBlendMtl material for V-Ray) with two simple diffuse sub-materials. The scene has two mr portal lights (VRayLights with rectangle shape) with matching intensity - I am using portals with mr since they are newer and more efficient.

Note that I am NOT comparing V-Ray against mental ray, but V-Ray against V-Ray and mental ray against mental ray times.

Results are as follows (on my laptop):

First scene (plane):
mental ray: 5s for single material; 12s for the Blend material with two sub-materials.
V-Ray: 3s for single material (actually 3.7); 4s for the VRayBlendMtl material with two sub-materials.

Second scene (plane and teapot):
mental ray: 8s for single material; 20s for the Blend material with two sub-materials.
V-Ray: 7s for the single material; 7s for the VRayBlendMtl material with two sub-materials.

As you can see, layering more materials causes significant slowdowns for mental ray, where is the impact on V-Ray is minimal. The same results can be observed if you use more complex materials (e.g. with glossy hilights etc).

The scene is also in the folder (for 3ds Max 2009), in case anyone wants to try. Also note that these results are due to the intrinsic way the shading pipelines for these two renderers are implemented - they do not depend on the particular mr/V-Ray integration (3ds Max, Maya etc).

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morbid Angel]

well I must say that it is so. Mr is indeed slower in such process. Not that I doubted your math genius but I just wanted to understand for my self.
Indeed mr, even using custom layered shaders, gets progressively slower with each layer added.

[deflix]

vray has to be the best biased renderer out there - best community by far.

[Metin_7]

To me V-Ray is the best renderer because of:

1: V-Ray's great rendering results. There are new unbiased renderers that may have a small advantage in terms of photorealism, but the images rendered by V-Ray have a certain attractiveness and visual charm that is hard to exactly explain.

2: V-Ray's ease of use. Although you have to gain a certain knowledge about the many settings, it is relatively easy to set up a scene. For example, environment lighting is a simple as putting a map in the 3ds Max Environment map channel.

3: V-Ray's customizability. You have full control over anything you'd like to influence (lighting, reflections, refractions, shadows, etc.), which is a major advantage of a biased renderer as opposed to an unbiased renderer.

4: V-Ray's integration. V-Ray is the king in terms of compatibility with all of the many 3ds Max features, materials and textures (even Simbiont is not forgotten).

5: V-Ray's support and community. There's always a good atmosphere in the V-Ray community and always fine technical support from Chaos Group.

6: V-Ray's popularity. V-Ray has become a standard in the rendering field, so there's much public support and third-party support (scenes, materials, textures, tutorials, you name it).

Ok, I hope Vlado will now offer me a lifetime of free V-Ray upgrades.

[YoyoBoy]

There are some things mental ray is better then vray at...

Care to elaborate?

[Morbid Angel]

Mental ray offers a few unique things which are not yet present in vray. For example flushable entities such as .map files which can be read and dumped out of memory on demand alowing for rendering of extremely large textures without a great demand from ram, thus freeing up memory for other geometries and what not.

Powerful fast subscattering shader and its components, such as fast skin specular which can be used for other effects. At this time however vray is also getting a new and quite amaizing fast sss skin shader but it still has ways to go.

Fast rasterizer which offers a way of motion blurring objects which can be as fast if not faster then vray's true 3d motion blur. Rasterizer is not physically accurate, but its a great substitute for an extremely slow 3d motion blur in mental ray.

Personally I also think that mental ray offers a greater control in certain areas such as shaders and various nodes, like mental ray light nodes, mental ray bump map, and the fact that you can build your own framebuffer output passes allows for total control of the output. Vray's framebuffer is also very powerful, and with a lot less clicks but for advanced users who get indepth with shading networks and other things this customization and flexibility can really go a long way.

Mental ray also being an older renderer has quite a bit of custom shaders available which are written by other users. They are not always compatable accross platforms but if you are on winxp for example, you may benefit from a lot of them.

Mental ray in maya also supports fluids which is a very important factor. While vray is a great renderer for hard surfaces, other entities like fluids or complex sss objects can be difficult to achieve.

I also enjoy the lens shaders in mental ray, I think they are quite simple and easy to use with the native camera as oppose to using vray physical camera, since often we have to deal with tracked data which comes with various animation curves on camera lens and etc.

Lastly the hair and fur is greatly supported by mental ray with yet another custom shader which allow for even more control. This is not the case with vray at this time. Vray can only render geometrical form of hair, if one is not using vray fur.

[sv]

Mental ray offers a few unique things which are not yet present in vray. For example flushable entities such as .map files which can be read and dumped out of memory on demand alowing for rendering of extremely large textures without a great demand from ram, thus freeing up memory for other geometries and what not.

Powerful fast subscattering shader and its components, such as fast skin specular which can be used for other effects. At this time however vray is also getting a new and quite amaizing fast sss skin shader but it still has ways to go.

Fast rasterizer which offers a way of motion blurring objects which can be as fast if not faster then vray's true 3d motion blur. Rasterizer is not physically accurate, but its a great substitute for an extremely slow 3d motion blur in mental ray.

Personally I also think that mental ray offers a greater control in certain areas such as shaders and various nodes, like mental ray light nodes, mental ray bump map, and the fact that you can build your own framebuffer output passes allows for total control of the output. Vray's framebuffer is also very powerful, and with a lot less clicks but for advanced users who get indepth with shading networks and other things this customization and flexibility can really go a long way.

Mental ray also being an older renderer has quite a bit of custom shaders available which are written by other users. They are not always compatable accross platforms but if you are on winxp for example, you may benefit from a lot of them.

Mental ray in maya also supports fluids which is a very important factor. While vray is a great renderer for hard surfaces, other entities like fluids or complex sss objects can be difficult to achieve.

I also enjoy the lens shaders in mental ray, I think they are quite simple and easy to use with the native camera as oppose to using vray physical camera, since often we have to deal with tracked data which comes with various animation curves on camera lens and etc.

Lastly the hair and fur is greatly supported by mental ray with yet another custom shader which allow for even more control. This is not the case with vray at this time. Vray can only render geometrical form of hair, if one is not using vray fur.

last two points i completely 100% agree with, and think that Vray lacks in this department, Although MAx's hair and fur in my opinion has a lot of it's own issues, Mental Ray's hair shaders are stunning. Vray can render the hair and fur in buffer mode though, not only geometry, but max's hair and fur (apart from the styling) has issues. Attaching physical camera 'modifiers' to max's normal cameras would be a really welcome thing in my opinion, and it has been asked for before, as tracking programs only create max cameras as you state.