Vray vs Keyshot?

[Kinetic99]

Hello and thanks for your time,

There seems to be a little showdown between Vray and Keyshot at my work. The concern by the boss' are which software is better to render out photorealistic objects (jewelry, golden objects, etc) in the shortest amount of time.
Vray has been seen to be powerful, complex, flexible, with great results but it requires huge render times and long set-up times in the scene and rendering parameters.
Keyshot has been seen to be fast and efficient, easy to use, with great results but not as powerful as vray.
Keyshot seems to be winning the argument.

I believe Vray is a better software but I must admit render times are long. I do like Key shot and it also seems to motor right through a render, very fast with good enough results. I'd rather keep Vray as the rendering software.

What are your thoughts on Keyshot? Is it a good solution to render out pretty objects? How does it produce such fast render times?
In order to keep Vray as tool at work, what can I say about the software's advantages over Keyshot?

K

[Morbid Angel]

I'm not sure about keyshot's speed in rendering, I've never used it for anything, but looking at their prices it seems to be 2-3 times more expensive then vray. Also, as far as I understand its a standalone program, and as such, you will be limited by the limitations of that standalone program. While it may be fast to render things like watches, rings, other prop objects, it may not be as fast to render more complex scenes. The part about the animation is unclear to me, if you were to create animated sequences I don't understand really how the licensing would work with that they appear to employ license per core, which in my opinion is not the best deal. And their animated clips do not look anymore impressive then the rest of cg out there.

If you were to use 3ds max, then vray does support all the functionality of max, which is quite extensive and extensive flexibility of vray allows you to generate any output required, any passes, any mattes any masks etc.

While these days vray is not the fastest renderer, it is however one of the most developed ones. This only can happen after the software has been in use for many many years. I would hate to pay x number of thousands of dollars for a renderer and hit a brick wall on certain feature which it may not support or it may be in development.

Lastly, regarding the really long render time, I would strongly disagree there. We use vray in production because its in our opinion considered to be quite fast at getting things done. So in your specific cases a further investigation may be needed to determine why your render times are this high.