V-Ray for Maya over Arnold?

[larry.vasquez]

Hello,
I'm not looking for any flame war here. I'm a V-Ray Modo user, who has been very happy with V-Ray. But since Chaos Group discontinued development for that application, and I also use Maya, I was looking at continuing with surfacing and rendering in Maya with V-Ray.
I was just looking to see from Maya users what made you go with V-Ray vs Arnold, since you had the option with Maya?
Thanks for any insight.

[damaggio]

1st thing, Vray is not owned by Autodesk so it won’t get screwed up.
second , better support , features and access to quick patches and nightlies.
3 , much easier to work with, almost fully automated.
4, cloud rendering and free models and shading library.
5, you can request a new feature and good chance is gonna be implemented.
6, better Forum support . Vlado even chimes in from time to time.
7, better GPU development, way ahead of the game.
I could go own and own but my sushi is here.

[larry.vasquez]

Number one seems like that is a given. lol And I have liked that Chaos seems like they are focused and care very much about V-Ray (i.e. not spread as thin).
Thanks for the insight.

[damaggio]

You won’t regret, enjoy and happy gorgeous renders ahead for your work.
oh, and there’s a cloud system coming

[larry.vasquez]

Like I said, I really liked the V-Ray Modo implementation. It was so well done, I was able to follow tutorials of V-Ray done in Maya. Thanks again.

[oglu]

I would say that depends a lot on your needs. I use Arnold for private stuff and Vray on my dayjob.
What i need to render for my job wont be possible with Arnold. Cause i need a lot of RenderElements and lot of clipping objects. A lot matte stuff.
Most of those features do not exists in Arnold.

On the other hand if you need to render animation with motionblur, USD, Bifrost and Volumes go with Arnold.

[yolov]

I'm not here to convince anyone in anything, apologies in advance if that's how this is going to sound (not my intention, though). I just feel I need to make a few clarifications

We do support motion blur, USD and Volumes. We're even pushing for speed improvements on the volume side that will go out pretty soon, as part of a very long R&D project.

Bifrost - now that's another story. Up until very recently they didn't have a public SDK, so Arnold was practically the only renderer to support it for obvious reasons.
The new SDK is a node SDK, so not sure it will help other renderers to support it.
With V-Ray 5.20.02 we added support for the 2.4.0.0 version of Bifrost that supported USD. This helps in a few ways:
a) you can use it with V-Ray to freely modify and craft USD data, similar to how it's done in Houdini's Solaris
b) pass anything that's easily meshed to V-Ray

We're still trying to figure out how particles and volume simulations from Bifrost can be passed to V-Ray, so at some point we'll get there. On this front, I don't think anybody beats Arnold as of yet.
Now Bifrost itself - that's another topic I'm happy to discuss with anyone, maybe this isn't the right thread, but anyone interested can PM me and we can go from there.

[larry.vasquez]

Hey Alex, I appreciate your open and honest feedback. It's one of the reasons why I've been happy with Chaos and V-Ray.
Thank you Oglu also for your input. It's always nice to know pros and cons, and every thing has them.

[larry.vasquez]

One last question for anyone, is there a way to buy a license of V-Ray Next for Maya? I have V-Ray Next for Modo with render nodes. If I could purchase V-Ray Next for Maya, those render nodes would also work. I'll end up upgrading, but I'd like to get moving over to V-Ray in Maya quickly. Or is there a way, because V-Ray Modo being dead, to get the upgrade price on a different platform instead of having to buy a full new license? That would be make staying in V-Ray much easier going to Maya.

[yolov]

We only sell the latest version of our products, but the license for the latest version allows you to run previous versions too. This means that with a V-Ray 5 licenses, you'll be able to run V-Ray Next, if needed.
It would be best to contact our sales and support teams, explain the situation and see what offers they have available for migrating from Modo to Maya.
https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

Hope that helps.

[larry.vasquez]

If I got a version of Maya 5, could I also download V-Ray Next for Maya. Because my V-Ray Next is in Modo, and I'd like to get over to Maya with V-Ray.

[yolov]

Downloads for previous versions are available on the website, so yes.