I’ve just had a chat with our hardware suppliers, and they were raving about these ArtVPS Pure cards and Renderdrives. They were saying how quick they are at producing ridiculously realistic images.
It would be nice to get an unbiassed opinion before considering spending the large amounts of cash on the systems. Also, if I understand correctly, it would involve moving away from Vray entirely and generating scenes with ArtVPS specific materials/models/lighting. Am I right?
Ok…
Here, they were working with renderdrives since a few years and we did switch to Vray a few months ago,
For the speed issue: ARTvps claims that their stuff is faster, but their hardware been basicly the same since 4 years, so buying a render drive last winter was the same that buying a renderdrive back in 2001.. Just like if you were claming that your P3 800 could beat up today’s top notch computers…
B.T.W., we get way faster images with Vray (for our use), to be precise, 58.3 % faster, with better looking results ( executive planes interiors/exteriors, resolution over 3K)
The price: it is really expensive, you have to pay each year to get their new stuff.. If we take their word to say that 1 renderdrive equals over 16 computers, well, you can get a quite decent renderfarm with the amount of money.. and your renderfarm is not dependant on 1 program.. It could be used for other stuff…
Producing ridiculously realistic images: Well, that’s what each software provider wants to make you beleive, actually, Renderdrive is about 3 years late on GI, HDRI.. (It is comming out now, and I’ll belive in all these features when I’ll see them) it is a nice raytracing solution, I think realistic images depends on user, I’ve seen amazing images in Brazil, Vray, Maxwell, F-R, Radiosity and even scanline.. all depends what you do with it..
So, Just want to be clear, I do not want to destroy renderdrive, I think it is a nice product.. Just saying going hardware for rendering means you are stuck with it after.. For results, well browse any renderer mfg, and you’ll se that their stuff ain’t better, ain’t worst, and for speed/quality ratio, well I think that you are actually on the good forum 
Oh, B.T.W, if you are going with renderdrives, let me know
We do have some renderdrives that we would like to sel l
Thanks for the response.
It is quite a rich claim, I must admit. Half the time spent producing an image with Vray is spent modifying ‘settings’ to get a good speed/quality ration going. It just sounds nice to be able to say: “well, thats glass - make it glass. That’s a nice shiny metal - apply a shiny metal texture…”. (After 4 years with Vray, I still find it very difficult (impossible) to make nice smooth blurry reflections!)
ArtVPS aren’t far from us in the UK. I remember going to an Expo in London a few years ago (6 or 7 actually) and talking to their main sales guy about these renderdrives. We carried on asking the question: “Is it faster?”. He wouldn’t answer. Their whole marketing strategy seemed to be based on the fact that it is REAL. Speed didn’t appear to be important to them.
Now their marketing has flipped over by heavily promoting the speedy render times.
You make a good point about a render farm being used for other apps. We use ours for Combustion/After Effects etc.
I’ve just read a 25-page document about a company who has employed the PURE/Renderdrive products in their offices. It did seem to back up what you have said about GI and HDRI. I can’t imagine going back to a situation without decent GI! In actual fact, I don’t think I could remember how to position fill-in omnis all over the place! Dome Of Lights…aaaaggggghhhhh!
well, to say this is glass, or this is metal,
There is the 1.5 comming, wich will include diff. shaders, But I don’t know how wide it will cover as materials, or pre-set stuff
On the other side, you can find lots of pre-made librairies out there, for pre-set materials, and after 4 years, your mat. librairy should start to get quite big…
And the fact: it is real, well, not, mabee materials are better (wich I think is not true) but you do need good light to put these materials in value, wich renderdrive is not able to do at the moment
after using vray for so long setting up materials comes as second nature to me. i know what ill get when i alter a setting in the m-editor. as for render drive…how much do they cost? cant you spend that money on a second computer?
an old model renderdrive 5000 is about 22 500$ US, ( I do not know if UK dealers sells it for the same price, we are probably paying a lot of shipping in north america…) you can afford lots of rendering power for that price.. 
I’m *reasonably* confident at many materials, but we rarely use libraries we have made for past projects. The reason for this is that we continue to develop our techniques - even with 4 years past experience with Vray, we still tweak things.
(But we still can’t get blurry metals looking very good on curvey profiled metal composite cladding in a reasonable amount of time.)
In a way, I am glad it is not so easy to do what we do. If it was, architects and developers would be doing it themselves!
Renderdrives have come down in price.
They are very good for doing stuff like phitorealistic renders of products “virtual photography” but they are not so good for architectural scenes or models that contain heavy geometry.
Tricky… you dont need to place omni’s in a dome when rendering on a renderdrive because you can use a renderman area light that acts as a dome, it works really well actually.
My advice would be to spend the money on a few renderslaves and Vray if you are producing architectural images/animations.
Craig
22 500$ USD!!! woah!!! thats alot. if you can get cheap render slaves for about hmmm. 2000 USD then i guess you can get 11 of those and 500 left back for a good meal to treat the staff. BTW..realise it was your HARDWARE guy recomending the product. its not like he will recommend SOFTWARE hehehe. he would be putting himself out by about hmmm…22 500$ USD if he did that
I had a very similar experience with renderdrive. We were given one to test out for a week. The quality was not there and the price was very high. Plus the speed was actually very slow. Their claims that it replaces 16 computers is insane since it can’t even replace one (in terms of speed). You are then tied to this boat anchor of a box which is out of date before you take it out of the box. Plus you have to change your whole pipeline. Keep in mind that was a few years back so thing might have changed. But at the time we were testing it versus MentalRay (vray did not exists yet). The only thing I liked about it was that is was RIB compiant. Software solutions will always rule over hardware since they can grow with your hardware:
http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=12220
and for $22k, you can buy 2 computer with quad dual-core AMD (8 cores per computer) like I saw at Siggraph. Doing a net render on that with Vray would blow the doors of anything IMHO.
you dont think a flexible gpu based system is feasible? I mean if they created one to work with vray, then BAM, shows over. right? I dont know squat about that stuff so Im only guessing. That gelato is supposed to be really coming on nicely though.
gelato is not very impressive, everything rendered I’ve seen looks like a game, a nicely rendered game but…
It does make sense to leverage the gpu’s already in a system though.
Da_elf: I take everything I hear with a pinch of salt. Obviously there are biassed opinions everywhere: in this forum, there will be a bias towards Vray of course. :roll:
I saw one of those quad machines at Siggraph - wow. Now that would be nice.
We have about 6 dual Xeon/2GB machines in our office. When we are rendering (or even if we aren’t in the warm summers) they scream like some wailing banshee! 6 large fans in each machine, all at full RPM. Now that’s annoying. Imagine what it would be like with quad-processor boards???
We have about 6 dual Xeon/2GB machines in our office. When we are rendering (or even if we aren’t in the warm summers) they scream like some wailing banshee! 6 large fans in each machine, all at full RPM. Now that’s annoying. Imagine what it would be like with quad-processor boards???[/quote]
You think that’s noisy? Wait till you hear a renderdrive on full chant… thats noisy! :lol:
gee. my boxx workstation hardly makes any noise and hardly goes over 43 degrees. and i live on a hot tropical island
Hi, I work with tha_blanch, and I’ve used nothing but Renderdrives for 6 years, and here’s my take: we do 1-3 milluion face scenes at 3412x2700, very high-res maps, no DOF (we do it in post), no particles, etc, just straight arch viz shots, and RDs don’t cut it. No GI, no caustics, no multi-pass, no plug-in support, no useful user-group, and you have to pay ALOT for software upgrades. The AR350 chips are the same chips that are in our 5-yr-old RD5000, and our new RD5000 (less than 1 yr old) is equipped with…drum roll…AR350s!! Yep, same chips as 5 yrs ago. The cool part, though is that 5 yrs ago they were as fast as 12 Pentium2s, and now they’re as fast as 12 P4s! That’s Intel-style marketing AKA BS. The speed hasn’t increased, and my dual 2.8 running mental ray (raytracing only, with same # of fill lights -all BIG area lights, etc) did the same scene at full res in 24h vs 25h for RD5000 and with much cleaner (RDs are very grainy), better quality. We’re switching to Vray on a renderfarm. The 1st advance I’ve seen from Art-render in 6 years is the newly-announced support for passes, GI, caustics, and bi-directional raytracing (is that the same as bi-directional path tracinf a la Maxwell?). Art-render goes on and on about HDR support, but it’s zero-bounce direct light only which you can do easily and as well in any software. Photoreal? It’s just a raytracer, so you can do raytracing-only in mental ray for faster, better results for far less money and tell your client it’s an unbiased renderer you’re using.
Sold!
I take it Vray doesn’t take advantage of the GPU being there. Will there be any support in the near future for this added processing capabilities?
Actually I do, that is because GPUs are probably the only thing that is growing faster then CPU’s in terms of technology. Plus, GPUs may actually be cheaper.
I used to think that GPU would be the way that the future is going, but I have not seen that much growth in the technology, so I am not so sure.
I tested one of those machines in 2000.
It is fast for raytracing but it wasn’t very production friendly. Maybe things have changed in the last 5 years - but we decided it was too much $$ for too little.
Today if I was spending that kind of money - I would look into a cluster or blade set up. The other important factor not to forget here is: safety in numbers. More machines are more work to maintain, but the system as a whole is much more reliable.
Plus let me just add this: Xbox 360 = $500 (or less).