I think the reason why MR is comming back, is the way it now works perfectly together with max2008 and can replace the scanline renderer!!!
With max 2008, MR became a serious competitor to vray and not only that it’s fast, stable (64bit) and expandable, it’s also in terms of quality somehow ahead of vray ..and not to forget that it’s shipped with max for “free”!
..hard times for chaos to aquire new customers!
Well, I would not exactly call mental ray “free”; you have paid for mental ray several times over by paying your 3ds Max subscription regularly (seeing as how in each new version many of the changes are in mental ray) and the high 3ds Max price initially. In contrast, if you paid for V-Ray five years ago, you can still use it now without additional charges.
In any case, the difference between renderers becomes smaller indeed; like I said long ago there will be time when they will all be very similar both in terms of features and quality (specifically for mental ray, achieved by reimplementing key features from V-Ray, I might add).
I can tell you that we don’t just sit and watch though; mental ray is playing the catch-up game now and we intend to keep it that way 
Best regards,
Vlado
Hi vlado,
You are right, subscription is something you have to payed all the time while MR doesn’t work… anyway, what i meant with “free” is that you still have to buy at least one 3d app which is supported by vray ..so if you have max you don’t really need a pro renderer anymore if you are happy with mr or don’t want to pay for the extra renderer..
Nice to hear that you are working on new features and speedups for vray!
Is the Realtime GIengine ready for launch ? *g*
Not to ruin the party, but I think that the graph only shows the amount of “SEARCHES” done with each term, not the actual number of users…
“Brazil” in the item list will push every other item down since the name of the country will appear an enourmous amount of times compared to the other renderers names…Hence, it will super-win in the graph.
Anyways, really cool little tool, Google rocks…
ciao
Gio
MR
I am a tutorial watcher and the only thing that I notice about MR is a lot of tutorials are being created using it. I am finding the same with Maya. I just bought 3 video tutorials in-line this week and all three are using Maya and MR.
Rumor has it that the next release of Revit will have MR as its render engine.