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I'd like to submit some very stratospheric thoughts and concerns I have about the way V-Ray is going and pick your brains on these--both users and Chaosgroup folks.
For a few releases now, I've been growing slightly uncomfortable about the direction V-Ray has taken in respect to the kind of stuff I do.
Like many of V-Ray's early users, I mainly dabble in archviz, especially interiors and especially complicated ones, with heavy geometry and complex shaders, which I generally render on a single machine. As you know, these are among the most demanding types of scenes for any renderer given the amount of indirect illumination. Yet I've been finding myself more and more in the situation of working on a scene--almost always an interior--that V-Ray is just not able to render in an acceptable time. When that happens, I generally find myself forced to switch renderer. Whenever I release one of my projects and it doesn't use V-Ray, it usually is the reason why.
I'm not sure why this is happening, but it seems to me V-Ray has become gradually less efficient at rendering the type of scenes I do. Four or five years ago, I could render this or this completely noise-free using BF/LC with little optimization and a much lesser rig than I have now. Then, a few releases later, around the time when the universal settings began to fail, render times for these kinds of scenes (using BF) began creeping up. That's when we started to have to tweak glossy subdivisions on each materials and multipliers on lights. Today, I'm not sure that I could render these scenes on my current machine using BF in an acceptable time.
This just happened to me again this week, having modeled and shaded an entire, complex, interior scene with many lights and a large 3D exterior around it, I found rendering it impossible, even with the new denoiser. Switching to another renderer solved the problem. Sure, it's never fast, but V-Ray seems to grind to a halt above a certain threshold when another renderer doesn't.
Don't get me wrong. I love V-Ray and I even like the way its development has gone lately--including the attempt to simplify settings, the fantastic GGX shader, etc. But I wonder if the refocusing on the film and advertising industries in the past few years and on big studios that work with render farms as a matter of course haven't resulted in making V-Ray less suited to the kind of work I do and to rendering on single machines.
(And by the way, I completely realize that the way I work is not typical of V-Ray users in general and that few people do all their rendering on their local machine these days)
Still, would love to hear others' thoughts on this.
For a few releases now, I've been growing slightly uncomfortable about the direction V-Ray has taken in respect to the kind of stuff I do.
Like many of V-Ray's early users, I mainly dabble in archviz, especially interiors and especially complicated ones, with heavy geometry and complex shaders, which I generally render on a single machine. As you know, these are among the most demanding types of scenes for any renderer given the amount of indirect illumination. Yet I've been finding myself more and more in the situation of working on a scene--almost always an interior--that V-Ray is just not able to render in an acceptable time. When that happens, I generally find myself forced to switch renderer. Whenever I release one of my projects and it doesn't use V-Ray, it usually is the reason why.
I'm not sure why this is happening, but it seems to me V-Ray has become gradually less efficient at rendering the type of scenes I do. Four or five years ago, I could render this or this completely noise-free using BF/LC with little optimization and a much lesser rig than I have now. Then, a few releases later, around the time when the universal settings began to fail, render times for these kinds of scenes (using BF) began creeping up. That's when we started to have to tweak glossy subdivisions on each materials and multipliers on lights. Today, I'm not sure that I could render these scenes on my current machine using BF in an acceptable time.
This just happened to me again this week, having modeled and shaded an entire, complex, interior scene with many lights and a large 3D exterior around it, I found rendering it impossible, even with the new denoiser. Switching to another renderer solved the problem. Sure, it's never fast, but V-Ray seems to grind to a halt above a certain threshold when another renderer doesn't.
Don't get me wrong. I love V-Ray and I even like the way its development has gone lately--including the attempt to simplify settings, the fantastic GGX shader, etc. But I wonder if the refocusing on the film and advertising industries in the past few years and on big studios that work with render farms as a matter of course haven't resulted in making V-Ray less suited to the kind of work I do and to rendering on single machines.
(And by the way, I completely realize that the way I work is not typical of V-Ray users in general and that few people do all their rendering on their local machine these days)
Still, would love to hear others' thoughts on this.
We have spent considerable time optimizing the render times and memory usage, but as always there might be things that we've missed. Oftentimes they may be stupid things which you can't notice as a user, but if we get a chance to profile such a scene, we could fix them. I realize that it's easier to switch to another renderer that handles that particular scene rather than get back to us, but if it's possible, it would be of great help.
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