Vraymtl vs standard

[Fredrik_Jadestone]

I've always been using vray materials since I heard thats the way to go when rendering with vray. Now I'm not so sure though. Watched a gnomon lightning class where the guy uses mental ray and Maya. He used an ambient only technique combined with an ambient occlusion pass to fill the scene with ambient light. Quick rendering and very effective. However vraymtl and ambient light doesn't work so I'm stuck with standard material for that.

Then I started fiddling around and realised that you have much more artistic freedom when using a standard material. For instance the control of spec and gloss makes it easier to fake a physical light with an omni instead of using a sphere with vraylightmat which frankly doesn't produce very convincing result since you achive no glow around it. you have the selfillumination slot aswell which is not present in the vraymatl.

All in all it seems that vray gives you less artistic freedom and ways to bend the rules beyond the physical correct one than one would like.

So is there something fundemental I will lose in going back to standard materials beside fastsss which I seldom use anyway.

[duke2]

I think standard is a bit slower in VRay. I could be wrong though.

[vlado]

If you don't plan on using GI, then using Standard materials might work better for you. They do give you more chances to cheat, but you have no way of telling if the resulting material is physically plausible or not.

If you use GI on the other hand (which is what V-Ray was mainly designed for), Standard materials will render slower or may produce incorrect results in some situations. In that case it is better to use VRayMtl materials. The VRayMtl material is kept simple (and perhaps somewhat more limiting) quite on purpose, because its goal is to produce a physically plausible material. (As a side note, the Arch&Design material does not have an ambient slot either, for exactly the same reason.)

Best regards,
Vlado

[Fredrik_Jadestone]

Hmm. Of course I will use GI to some extent. Sometimes only with one bounce on other occasions the full blown thing. Depends one the situation. For me physically correct is not the main goal but rather a nice looking image. If that means bending the rules abit from what is plausible, thats fine. Isn't that what set and studio lighters try to do that all the time, though it's harder since they operate in the physical world instead of 3d )

When you say that GI will sometimes produce incorrect results with standard material do you mean physically incorrect or weird funky artifacts incorrectness?

[RErender]

For your highlights concern- unlock the h-glossies and you can adjust the highlights using an omni without having a sphere to reflect

[Fredrik_Jadestone]

Thanks. Guess I'll mix and match depending on situation