Considering Vray

V-Ray V-Ray Common Public
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Dear reader,

I’m considering purchasing Vray to get my renders fixed for my freelance company. The only things from keeping me from purchasing is the fact that I’ve stumbled upon a topic where I read that SU8 doesn’t work properly with vray on OSX (iMac) ? Is this true?

Furthermore I’d like to ask some questions.

- Is there any way to change the way the topics show? At this moment it’s completely vice-versa compared to most other forums out there. I start with the last reply, whereas I prefer reading the original post first and start to read down towards the replies.

- I’m working on a windows machine at this moment combined with a MacBook pro core duo 2.26ghz. Would you advise me to purchase an iMac i7? Would this decrease my rendertimes compared to the MacBook pro? I’m just looking for a machine that does decent fast renders. My budget would be around 3000 euro’s.

Some sidequestions on the above:
- How much would a SSD disk decrease rendertimes?
- Does it make a big difference using a 1 or 2gb graphics card?
- How much influence does the amount of RAM storage express on the rendertime?

Sorry for this wall of text, it’s just some things that are crossing my mind that I can’t seem to find a decent answer to on the web.

Best regards,

Tijn Floris
Netherlands

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I will leave some of the questions for the V-Ray for Sketchup developers, but for the rest, please see my replies below.

There is a setting for this in you user profile. Click on the “Settings” link at the top right of the page, then select “General settings”, then scroll down to “Thread display options” and set the “Thread display mode” to “Linear - oldest first” or any other mode you prefer.

- I’m working on a windows machine at this moment combined with a MacBook pro core duo 2.26ghz. Would you advise me to purchase an iMac i7? Would this decrease my rendertimes compared to the MacBook pro? I’m just looking for a machine that does decent fast renders. My budget would be around 3000 euro’s.The iMac i7 would be definitely faster than the core duo for rendering. However it would be best to test first if the core duo is too slow for you.

- How much would a SSD disk decrease rendertimes?Not that much. Most of rendering is CPU-intensive, not disk-intensive. It might speed up the initial loading of textures though.

- Does it make a big difference using a 1 or 2gb graphics card?No; the regular V-Ray only uses CPU for rendering.

- How much influence does the amount of RAM storage express on the rendertime?It depends on the complexity of the scenes that you will be rendering. More complicated scenes with more objects and more textures will require more RAM. However, if your scenes already fit in the RAM that you have, then adding more RAM will not speed them up.

Best regards,
Vlado

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Vlado,

Very helpful reply! Thank you for the help!

The core duo is not too slow, but it’s a small screen and limited in ram storage, so I will purchase an iMac anyway I think. Do you have any experience in comparing Mac renders to windows renders? According to the local store macs were designed for this kind of work. How true is this?

Regards

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Also, would you recommend me going for mac or windows? Which would give me the best results spending 2-3000 euro’s? With a windows system I’d only have to purchase the motherboard/processor/ram/harddrive and graphics card…

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I’ve stumbled upon a topic where I read that SU8 doesn’t work properly with vray on OSX (iMac) ? Is this true?

This has not been a problem for the past couple of versions. V-Ray for SketchUp works with SketchUp 8 in it’s current release.

Note: The only thing we don’t support in V-Ray for SketchUp 8 on OSX, is having multiple SketchUp windows open at the same time. We don’t typically recommend having multiple windows of SketchUp open at the same time anyway, for the sake of saving system resources, but on OSX in particular this can be a problem due to the way OSX handles multiple windows being open for the same application.

On Windows based operating systems (XP, Vista, Win7), every time you open a new SketchUp window, a new instance of Sketchup is created, a new instance of our plugin is loaded, and we are able to handle each instance independently. On OSX, only one instance of SketchUp is created, and each window is just another document of the same application. So this means that on Windows, we are able to keep an independent copy of your render options, materials and lights, because there is one copy of these settings per application instance, and a new instance of the application is created when you open a new window. On OSX, there is only one copy of these settings that gets shared among all of the documents of the same application instance. This can cause some unexpected results and errors to occur.

We are still working on a way to be able to handle this type of environment (it’s called a Multiple Document Interface, or MDI), but we have not found a solution yet. So as long as you only have one document open at a time, V-Ray for SketchUp will work as expected. A majority of the code used to create the OSX version of the product is reused in the Windows version. When we make a change to one version, the change automatically effects all of the other versions. We also reuse a majority of this code to make V-Ray for Rhino, so when we update V-Ray for Rhino, a majority of those changes will also effect V-Ray for SketchUp. The main differences are in the code that is used to communicate directly with the host application (SketchUp or Rhino). This was part of our major plugin rewrite that we did for this last update for V-Ray for SketchUp. The goal is to be able to fix bugs and add new features faster and more effectively than ever before.

Also, would you recommend me going for mac or windows?
If you are not sure which system you would rather use, Mac or PC, I would like to point out that Macs can run both OSX and Windows. So really the only thing you should have really focus on, is what else you are going to be using the machine for, and what your budget is like. If V-Ray and SketchUp are going to be the main software used on the machine, then I suppose it really just comes down to budget. Some would argue that you can upgrade PCs… but at the pace that technology advances, typically by the time you are ready to upgrade a machine, it’s time to just buy a new one anyway (every 2-3 years). I would also like to point out that SketchUp is a 32bit application currently. This means that it has a limited amount of memory that it can use at any given time. Since we are (currently) a plugin that is tied to the SketchUp application itself, we are tied to the limitations of the application as well. It is not possible at this time, to use more than 4gb of memory at render time, using V-Ray for SketchUp. There are plans to bypass this limitation in the future by allowing users to render using an detached render process, but currently this limitation is in place.

I hope this information was helpful.

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Dkendig, thank you very much for your reply. It was helpful! My consideration between mac and pc was not solved, but it got to another level of thinking. The way I read it is:
- Mac isn’t substantially faster than PC when using sketchup + vray;
- Pc can run multiple sketchup programs at once, thus allowing me to render + work on another model at thesame time aslong as my cpu allows me to;
- Mac will still have more value when the system needs an update in 2-3 years, PC’s are virtually worthless by that time.

I guess it comes down to budget indeed, and what I will be using the system for. It will only be used for a game now and then and mostly email and internet.

The thing is though, for the budget for a mac I can buy a new highend pc with two monitors which would greatly increase productivity in my experience. If you got the time, give me your thoughts on the above. Otherwise, thanks alot for the effort in your reply!

Best regards,

Tijn

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My opinion - it comes down to processor power. You can buy a lot more CPU cores/ clock speed in a PC per dollar spent. The faster your CPU and the more cores you have, the faster the render times. You could even buy a couple of PCs and make a render farm (many CPUs) for the cost of one high end mac.

Andy

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I don’t really like to support one OS or the other, it’s all about personal preference and budget as far as I’m concerned. I like Mac and PC equally. I typically develop on a Macbook Pro, but I’m using Windows 7 most of the time. This is mostly due to the fact that Rhinoceros is a Windows only product so far (they’re working on Mac compatibility), and switching between OSX and Windows can be kind of confusing sometimes (keyboard shortcuts, file paths, etc). I love OSX though…

- Mac isn’t substantially faster than PC when using sketchup + vray;
correct

- Pc can run multiple sketchup programs at once, thus allowing me to render + work on another model at thesame time aslong as my cpu allows me to;
like I said in my previous post, I wouldn’t really recommend doing that, because the second instance of SketchUp is going to eat up system resources. I guess it all depends on what you’re doing though.

- Mac will still have more value when the system needs an update in 2-3 years, PC’s are virtually worthless by that time.
I don’t think I’d say that necessarily. They both will become outdated in the same time frame. If you’re holding on to a machine for more than 3 years, you’ve got a dinosaur on your hands. I was just remarking that people who harp on Mac for not being easily upgradable don’t really have a leg to stand on. If you upgrade a processor on a PC, you’ll likely need to upgrade your motherboard (unless you didn’t get the highest end processor when you got your motherboard). When you upgrade your motherboard, you’ll likely need or want faster or more memory, and a better graphics card. You’ll likely need/want a new power supply as well, either because the old one is working on kicking he bucket, or because your new hardware requires more power output than the old power supply can handle. So… in the end when you “upgrade” a PC, you are either doing a very minor upgrade, or you’re replacing everything other than your optical drive and hard drive. Oh, and when you change your system’s hardware dramatically, you will most likely need to reinstall your OS, as well as any applications you have installed in the past… A 1tb hard drive currently costs about $50… So “upgrading” your PC is kind of a non existing entity these days, at least in my opinion. The two platforms are basically the same these days.

The thing is though, for the budget for a mac I can buy a new highend pc with two monitors
Typically Macs are high end machines to begin with… so if you’re just interested in getting an extra monitor, they aren’t really that costly these days if you pick one up from Newegg.com or some other place that sells computer hardware. Mac Minis aren’t too shabby, they’re low profile, and you can pick one of those up for about $600-$1,000. If you’re going to buy a machine from a store, rather than building it yourself, I don’t see much difference between Mac and PC. If you build it yourself, you can cut some costs and make a machine that can fit in a smaller budget. I never buy PCs in a store, I always build them.

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Thanks both again for replies. Very helpful Once again!
I have made a decisiOn and wil buy a pc. Just one question remains then, what kind of monitor should I be looking for to get the most realistic color display ?

Again thanks alot for your advice

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Oh, does sketchup / vray support the i7 6core cpus? In other words, would it be wise to purchase one of those?

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Not sure what monitor to recommend, but V-Ray supports any cpu your compatible operating system can support.

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Cheers for the help all, purchased sketchup 8 for windows.

Might aswell update you on the pc I chose:
Went for an i7 970 boxed, 12 mbs hyperX ram and an Asus GeForce gtx 470.
Should be fine I guess :wink: