vray timing comparisons

[Brian briggs]

Hi,

I am looking at doing some timing comparisons between renderers, in particular Brazil and Vray. I was wondering if anyone could explain in detail what slows down Brazil and Vray.
Is it motion blur, area lights, depth of field, raytracing reflections, refractions, shadows etc?

I need to create some scenes that hi-lite each packages weaknesses in terms of render speed.
If you also have some example scenes, with images and timings that you could post, this would be very helpful. I have a scene that I can give you if you are willing to partake in this speed comparison.

If you are a serious user of either of these packages I would be very interested in your experiences.

[flipside]

If you're looking for an answer to the question 'which one is the best renderer', I think you'll never find the answer because there is no single answer to that question.

In general what slows down any renderer are blurry reflections/refractions, area shadows, many GI bounces, motion blur, objects emitting light because of self illuminated mat, translucency, GI on displaced surfaces (like grass), ...

What renderer is best depends on many things and lots of them are also personal preferences and what your trying to achieve. My top reasons for liking vray are not special features, but the ease of use and logic behind it, and also this great forum and its users and the very symphatetic makers of Vray. Everything else comes in second place.

[cocolas]

I've spent a few months on trying out all three of them - their full versions.

I started out a couple years ago as a Brazil user...and even though I really liked it, it was way too slow for what I do (mainly arch viz stuff).....while final render was faster then brazil, it had a lot of trouble in getting shadows nice and crsip, plus there was trouble with their map filters....they didn't behave as aspected in max or the other renders.....the forum wasn't that great either.....

vray on the other hand, was first of all cheaper then brazil, plus as flipside said, fast and logical in the setup process.....I also had good and predictable results with it as soon as I started using it.

But, again as flipside mentioned, in the end is a matter of what you're trying to achieve w/ it and your personal prefferences......
another BIG PLUS for vray is this awesome forum: growing every day and putting out some of the best work in cg....with A LOT of helpfull people when things start to go wrong. Also the developers are very hands-on with the artists community and will usually answer your questions w/in the same day, sometimes a few hours after you contact them.

paul.

[f97ao]

I did a lot of testing with Brazil 1.0 and also Vray when they both were fairly new. And I think that Brazil creates slightly better looking pictures (or at least it did at the time) but it takes far longer to render.

And Brazil really lack many things that I need, some will come in 2.0 though. For example I cannot imagine to live without displacement mapping. And well bake3d is very nice to have when it works. And ahh distributed rendering also, this will speed up a ton if you do bigger images and have many computers, Brazil didn't have this the last time I looked you should consider this if you do still images. Another area that I know that Vray is fast but don't know about Brazil is that Vray is very good with Hyper Threading, Brazil I don't know. Brazil is fast with ray tracing I know, but personally don't use it much. Also I don't think Brazil has real physics motion blur (I think they are adding it for 2.0).

Brazil is also very easy to use, perhaps easier than Vray.

For some tests I think I would try to focus real world situations.

Perhaps ad a few lights and some blur, som glossy reflections etc. It is also good to create scenes with have more specific setups, focusing on one thing. Like moving water, arcitectual etc.

Hope I made any sense.
/Andreas

[jacksc02]

Brian - Email me I have the answers that you are after

Chris Jackson
cj@arcad.co.nz
www.arcad.co.nz

[sk_fly]

I have found that when using lots of opacity maps Brazil is faster. I scene for example with shag hair as grass, all turned to geometry at render time and haveing opacity mapped weeds and various grasses on them can take on tenth the time in Brazil as in VRay. Though a scene with lots of xfrog trees, a more limited use of opacity maps takes about and eight the time in vray as brazil. In both of these tests the main shadow casting light either had avray shadow for vray or brazil shadow for brazil, neither were area shadows. Also if you are motion blurring something behind glass in Brazil it won't work, Brazil does a vector blur similar to Max's image blur, and it can't blur raytraced reflections or refractions.. It works perfectly in VRay which has 3d motion blur

[Long John]

i wonder if some of you have links to interior rendrings made with brazil?

brazil is so afwull slow when you use more bounces + it need so much time to tweak the photon map.

the materials are great and much better then vrays... but speed sucks and brazil has not displacement like vray.

[RErender]

Just a note- Sk_fly's grass test would likely render atleast twice faster than it did if he also utilized vramtls's to do the opacity when rendering with V-Ray..

[sk_fly]

Re-render. This may be true is using GI, but I tried all three methods for myself and found that standard materials are faster than vray using the refraction slot with standard lighting and vray shadows. I must ad I am using the internal copy of vra, I don't know if that makes a difference. By the way, I'm a girl.

Shana

[tom schuelke]

Hi

some time ago i made a comparison of vray and brazil. there was a thread. somewone wanted to know if vray was abel to get as good gi results as brazil did.

so my result.

Brazil seems to be optimized for very perfect immages right from the start. very smal gi results are calculated, but it takes much time to render this.
vray on the oather hand seems to bee optimised from it start parameters for litle bit worth gi results thinking of the details in gi shdow parts. but on the oather hand it was much muchfaster three to five times faster.

so we tried to see if we could tweak vray for as good results as brazil.
And it worked. but this made vray as slow as brazil.

so vray for mee seems better right now first because distributed rendering, secound for displacement. And most for its speed. Oh yes one other reason for vray vote, is the possibillity for precalculatiion of gi solutions, that you can reuse in fligh through situations (for architecture).

only thing missing better opacity , as good materials as in Brazil and passes for compositing. also causics that split to colors (dont remember the name of this).

But it realy depends on what you plan to do.

Tom