Is Vray better?

[^Lele^]

Whatever fits the bill goes, here (Frantic Films VFX / Prime Focus), and fanboyism is frowned upon.
As a company, shows ARE produced with other engines too, when for one reason or the other VRay doesn't cater for all necessities.
Those reasons also include USER ability, and not only technical specs.
If anything, a big issue with VRay is that it's too clever, and it's able to render stuff that should really just return a dialog box insulting the user.
Hence, it encourages somehow to work sloppily, knowing VRay'll take it.
And when the error's discovered, it's often well down the line...

[duke2]

Whatever fits the bill goes, here (Frantic Films VFX / Prime Focus), and fanboyism is frowned upon.
As a company, shows ARE produced with other engines too, when for one reason or the other VRay doesn't cater for all necessities.
Those reasons also include USER ability, and not only technical specs.
If anything, a big issue with VRay is that it's too clever, and it's able to render stuff that should really just return a dialog box insulting the user.
Hence, it encourages somehow to work sloppily, knowing VRay'll take it.
And when the error's discovered, it's often well down the line...

I know the guys at Blur try to stick to MR now, they're still using Brazil, and whenever realism is required, they turn to VRay. Whatever get's the job done really!

[trajic]

That was my look on it as well, "getting the job done", but as quickly and efficiently as possible. Most of the guys here seem to think that with Revit being able to export promaterials and lighting into max that it becomes faster and better. I still think my Vray images are better than their mr images with half the amount of time spent on it. They still think the workflow is easier when materials transfer from Revit to max.

[rmejia]

They still think the workflow is easier when materials transfer from Revit to max.

It could be easier , right now I think it only sounds easier.

I use Revit and Max, tried the whole FBX export with MR lights and materials when it came out and it was slow to render in Max... and there is no file linking. The scenes still need to be optimized, it's not as plain and simple as just exporting and rendering. In the Revit forums people could not get it to work that easily (most of them don't want to learn 3dsMax I think is the problem, they just want great renderings with the push of one button). I did not find it to be an easier or better workflow, so I gave up on it and went back to exporting the Revit file as a dwg, file linking, and replacing the materials for V-Ray materials in Max. Vlado mentioned a few months ago that they were working on a way of converting the promaterials to V-Ray materials and rendering them directly. That might facilitate the material transfer from Revit to Max using V-Ray as the renderer.

Link to promaterial conversion thread

[pskdude]

Hey

Coming from an Architectural point of view, it has been a very interesting year for myself i took on the chalenge to use vray in my firm at first it was very difficult, having minimal cg background. After months of tutorials and tips tricks and the help and support of the Vray community i must say iam very happy to be part of this family and after learning and producing great images i will tend to say the hard work has paid off and i am very happy i made the decision to go with Vray. So in my opinion Vray is superior from mr and others however you will need to take on the responsability of learning the softwares little tricks here and there to produce very nice images. ( Not saying you can produce clean quick images with little expeirience) however if you look around the gallery and see some of the work these guys produce it is phenomenal. So happy new year and may you decide to join our community. Wish you the best of luck.

rg

[mmikee]

I stay away from the Promaterials. They are not as user friendly as they might appear.
In my experience, they are Very slow.


Regards,
Mike

[Morbid Angel]

Our projects usually are 100,000+ square feet, sometime contain billions of polygons and 100s if not 1000s of area lights.

I am interested to know how you achieve fast render times and able to render these kind of scenes in mental ray?

[animagic]

I am interested to know how you achieve fast render times and able to render these kind of scenes in mental ray?

Fast render times may be subjective.. This often depends on the project, but we often are targeting an average frame of 15-20 min on our farm. If the scene has extra large poly count with 1000s+ lights it may be 2 hours... we have just found with the types of animation projects that we do, we run into less problems with MR than we do with Vray. This varies from animated people/vehicles, cleaning up area shadows, translucency on leaves and the bigest factor which is time. If we have a project that needs to be rendered in a week or a month we can adapt MR to get the job done, if we have the month the we could probally use Vray but if it is a week we are probally SOL with Vray.
D

[rotab4d]

How about TV Cartoon series with alot of character animation ... i mean that style of pixar movies ... ( as we will start on one soon ) .. alot of artists say that MR has that artistic look that suits cartoon production and Vray is too realistic for cartoon .. any advice

[mmikee]

http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbu...ad.php?t=43610

[^Lele^]

My goodness, we're definitely into the very subjective realm.
Clean area shadows?
What do you mean VRay doesn't clean them?
Care to illustrate with images your idea of a clean area shadow with both the packages?

As for cartoons, have a play with the VRay passes.
I get some stunning cartoon-like looks out of them, while the beauty looks photoreal indeed.

[deflix]

Fast render times may be subjective.. This often depends on the project, but we often are targeting an average frame of 15-20 min on our farm.
D

Are you using standard omni lights or do you have 500 8 core render nodes

[mike_kennedy]

There are tricks for doing fast area lights, sample sizes, Vray Light Material and so forth.
We find Max Spots with the area shadow option in conjunction with Vray Light materials to add in as fills helps. The Upcoming Vray Light Mesh options sound very promising though, I have never been a fan of using jut normal area lights...in any rendering package.

[animagic]

Are you using standard omni lights or do you have 500 8 core render nodes

Lighting is always project specific, exterior may just be MR sun and sky or a the same night shot may have 1000's of lights 100's of them with area shadow, same goes for interior.... As far as render farm its NOT so large around 60-70 cpu's (total threads/cores) totaling about 150-200ghz

My goodness, we're definitely into the very subjective realm.
Clean area shadows?
What do you mean VRay doesn't clean them?
Care to illustrate with images your idea of a clean area shadow with both the packages?

I don't have access to it right now, but we have done apples to apples projects rendering the same basic setup (environment/lights/materials) with MR and Vray and the MR was faster to a cleaner result. But I will say that the Vray lighting was superior, but when you client asks "why my animation looks fuzzy" we go for cleaner animations than sexier lighting... This is a judgment call that only the boss gets to make...

[Morbid Angel]

But I will say that the Vray lighting was superior

As far as lighting goes, vray and mental ray reply on physical algorythms which are similar to each other (vlado can correct me here if Im wrong). Both renderers are capoble of achieving identical lighting results...

For the anti-aliasing quality, mental ray uses adaptive subdivision aa method, which is also available in vray. If you compare the quality in sampling between two renderers this factor has to be taken into account.