What can Arnold do that VRay cant?

[stezza]

Not very cost effective over a 18 month period for one thing...

[Morbid Angel]

Not very cost effective over a 18 month period for one thing...

I don't know much about arnold. Back in the day we did comparison with vray and found that it can render generally with the same speed and quality as vray. I think it has some limitations to interiors, like no light cache and irradiance map. Also the way its sampling works is exponential so if you get grain you have to raise the sampling to power of 2 each time, gets clean image but takes much longer. I also heard that it has issues with hair, you need to split the scene up so that the hair can get a lot more samples (cause it needs it) but the scene is rendered separately with lower samples, its kind of a pain. However those are all just small things imho, the biggest factor back in the day was that it cost as much as it did, and as far as I could find out it did not have render licenses so each render machine would be basically a user license. That put the cost very high and small business / freelancer just can't justify it.

[pixelmonk]

Arnold RenderView features. It's ease of use is a lot better than VFB. The debug options within the ARV make it quite fast to do lookdev. Something like Isolate Selected is worth its weight in gold. I wish VFB had it. It feels like VFB focuses mainly on the post filtering side of the image, eg what happens after you render, but ARV seems to focus on analyzing your render, giving you more access to elements within the render (not meaning render elements or AOVs).

Vray is still my go-to, especially with the subscription pricing of Arnold but it feels like with Arnold in-house at Autodesk, their integration will continue and be more robust.

[selavfx]

Isolate selected and the ARV for sure! On top of that going back to Maya Standard Nodes like "Layered Texture" for layering texture inputs (color and float) with alpha and proper blending modes was quite annoying, when coming from Anders Langlands Utilities like "LayerColor/LayerFloat" in Arnold which is a breeze to work with in Maya.
I know its not Vray's Fault that Autodesk doesn't provide more up-to-date Utility Nodes for easier and convenient use and yes, I am aware of the so called "LookDevKit Shading Nodes".
So I guess I would love to see certain Utility Nodes like the Anders Langland one's coming with Vray for Maya!

[Morbid Angel]

I hate maya utility nodes.

[smbell]

Isolate selected and the ARV for sure! On top of that going back to Maya Standard Nodes like "Layered Texture" for layering texture inputs (color and float) with alpha and proper blending modes was quite annoying, when coming from Anders Langlands Utilities like "LayerColor/LayerFloat" in Arnold which is a breeze to work with in Maya.
I know its not Vray's Fault that Autodesk doesn't provide more up-to-date Utility Nodes for easier and convenient use and yes, I am aware of the so called "LookDevKit Shading Nodes".
So I guess I would love to see certain Utility Nodes like the Anders Langland one's coming with Vray for Maya!

yes please!

[jasonhuang1115]

I hate maya utility nodes.

Me too. And I think having V-ray specific utilities nodes for look-dev and shading will help porting materials among software that have Vray integration, no?

[Rens]

I have some OSL utility shaders and it's very easy to make new ones. Which ones are you looking for specifically?

[selavfx]

Hey Rens, nice to see you around
That would be great!

So like I said, I really like Anders Langslands approach for layering multiple inputs together. Its plain, simple, self-explanatory and just works.
So there is actually a bunch of Utilities, but the one's which interests me the most are those 4:



The LayerColor is actually quite similar to the composite-node in 3dsMax and looks like this (there are actually 8 Slots in total):

I think it is also closer to the VrayBlendMaterial (but for textures/procedurals, not materials of course) than Maya's Layered Texture (and I hate the "Layered Texture"!).
The background layer (Layer 1) will be blended over black if its alpha is not 1 and the Blend Modes are basically stolen from Photoshop, which isn't to bad


The CombineColor/Float looks like this:

I know that one can definitely achieve those operations with Maya Standard Tools (Multiply/Divide, Plus/Minus/Average, etc), but its just way more convenient and faster to work with.


So maybe there are even better ways for this topic, but this is at least what I enjoy to use when working with Arnold.
I am keen to see what you come up with
Cheers!

[jasonhuang1115]

What Sebastian said!

[Rens]

Alright. I might have the PS modes translated to OSL as well (link below has all the Nuke modes), but basically you need something like this, but with 8 inputs, right?
http://www.rensheeren.com/blog/osl-merge2/

[Morbid Angel]

Rens one thing that would be great is not to have a limit of 2 layers, rather multiple dynamic layers sort of like max composite.

[selavfx]

Cool! Yeah basically yes, but additionally with mappable alpha channels for each Layer and the BlendMode for each Layer

Edit: yes, pretty similar to composite in 3dsMax!

[vlado]

That's not a fundamental difference between the engines though; shaders are easy to write. Anything else?

Best regards,
Vlado

[selavfx]

Agreed, in a way. But I still think that "Integration" into the Host App is a very important part when comparing render engines as a whole. In the end it all comes down to how fast and convenient I can setup assets and scenes and especially for lookDev it helps to have things like render/isolate selected shading nodes, framebuffer features for debugging, good utility nodes, etc..
Its actually hard to specifically point on certain things which differ fundamentally these days. I do have a feeling that Arnold IPR starts a little faster and that Arnold leaves a smaller memory footprint on heavy scenes with lots of textures and heavily displaced meshes.. but I can't proof this by numbers and it actually doesn't bother me too much tbh. On the other hand Vray feels more versatile and often times faster to render the final image and it gives me DBR, GPU Rendering, etc.. But again, at least for me, artist time is more important than render time and it helps to have a tight integration with the ability to tweak and debug fast and interactive.