Out of the Box Settings

[Bruce Hart]

Hey Guys,
a few years back I switched from Mental Ray to Vray, and was very glad to make the switch. I regret not making the change earlier.

In learning Vray I looked at YouTube Videos, numerous net tutorials and the Complete Guide. I've always been puzzled by how the default GI settings are set to Brute Force and light cache, with show calc phase off.
This means that someone first getting into Vray might find their first render is rather slow and stays black for a while until the final render pass.

One of the best things I find in my day to day workflow is I can see what the render is like very quickly during test renders with the LC calc phase and cancel if needed. In Mental Ray you often need to wait a while before the Final Gather pass is clear enough to see if the render is on the right track.

I wonder if it would be better to have the default GI on Irradience Map with say a Medium preset, and with calc phase set to on for both IM and LC. It seems to me like Vray is not being shown in it's best light

Another small point is that it would be good if the representation of the Vray sky in the viewport and material swatch could have exposure compensation so it does not appear white (when the sun and sky is set to 1)

[joconnell]

For stuff like this, set up vray the way you'd like it and savve the file as maxstart.max in the default folder of your project and it'll be loaded every time max starts.

[Bruce Hart]

Hi - yes you're exactly right. I have been loading my own presets for some time. I was really thinking of what it is like for people new to the program and activate GI for the first time. The speed and quality of Vray compared to Mental Ray really impressed me, but only after I hit upon settings that are not the defaults.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

I think as default option should be the progresive path tracer mode of rendering - which works even better than LC/IRR in my opinion... - however there are still things that it does not support...

[vlado]

Another small point is that it would be good if the representation of the Vray sky in the viewport and material swatch could have exposure compensation so it does not appear white (when the sun and sky is set to 1)

This is something that we are considering, yes.

As for the default GI settings, we can probably set them to irradiance map/light cache; they are what they are because initially we did not have the light cache in V-Ray, and things sort of stayed with the old defaults...

Best regards,
Vlado

[Bruce Hart]

Cool. Cheers Vlado.

I should mention the context of why I wrote this. I work as an in-house arch viz person and one of my colleagues is a very knowledgeable and somewhat diehard/militant Mental Ray user. While using MR we had an impression that while the quality of Vray is great, the render times would be too slow for our production needs (not knowing any better). Vray also appeared to have a bewildering array of settings which would take too long to learn.

We got hold of an NFR version of Vray, and to my pleasant surprise Vray is easy to use, is heaps faster and more stable. I then had to convince my MR friends that Vray was worthwhile and worth paying money for. At one point we had a "render off" doing a side-by-side render time compare with MR . Thankfully I was able to achieve better quality and speed after 3 weeks, that took me about 6 months to get with MR (and still not as good). We have gone from a Mental Ray environment to an all Vray environment across 3 offices since then.

So in terms of winning over the Mental Ray crowd, perhaps the default settings changed a bit so that people realise how easy things can be IM+LC with show calc phase on

Keep up the great work Chaos Team

[michaelwbell]

I think Bruce has a good point. It's another thing that could make Vray easier for beginners. I was using Vray for around a month before a colleague showed me the 'Show Calc phase' buttons.