I would agree. I have tried it sevral times and I can’t see what all the fuss was about. I do see a lot of great images on-line and 9 out of 10 times is is a Corona render. 10 years ago I started using V-Ray because most of the great images were combing from V-Ray.
Its going to be even tough for sure! I am finding it difficult to match pricing with other freelancers here in India, mostly because they are working dirt cheap.. obviously because their only investment is in hardware…otherwise it is practically not feasible to work that low.. i can imagine how difficult it must be for freelancers in those countries where cost of living is much higher… i sometime feel i should join back to some company for fulltime job..
ya me too, i still vray fans 
same here in malaysia, you can see in my status i am writing looking for job…but with age at 48, its hard to get a job here and there
Corona IPR is much faster than Vray IPR and I’m extensively using both for Auto-Viz. Personally for me, the post production tools in the Frame Buffer make it a lot easier for me to visualise what I will do in post, which is a great thing to have. Sometimes I don’t even bother opening Photoshop cause I’ve go the look I want right inside the Frame Buffer. The VFB is almost the same as it was 10 years ago.
I’m actually looking at moving away from CPU rendering as my 4790k vs my 1080ti doesn’t hold a candle to it. I was playing around with Fstorm last night and although it’s exceedingly fast, it does feel unpolished and a product of one single guy.. but at 240 euros a year it’s impossible to say no to.
I think the rental model isn’t always a bad thing. The issue is when it becomes overly expensive and prices people (existing customers) out of the market.
Look at Autodesk. A licence use to cost £5000, then £500 a year (approx) on subscription. That was a big outlay for me when I started, but I always wanted to run a legit business, so I took the hit. At the moment Autodesks rental is around £200 per month. That’s a lower cost to get up and running, but after 2 years you’re out of pocket. For me Autodesk rental is too expensive, and the progress of development falls way short of what everyone expects.
With Autodesk, you’re always tied into to paying. If you don’t, you lose your permanent licence / no way to upgrade. Or you pay the rental. When you have little choice, it soon leaves a bitter taste in your mouth.
However look at what Adobe have done. For £50 a month, you get access to their entire CC range. This is affordable, and great value, and you can see the actual progress they’re making (rather than just changing icons and bolting on another renderer!).
What I’ve always liked about Vray the paths to upgrade when you want. You were never forced into a sale, and if you stopped on the previous version, you were never penalised.
I pay quarterly for MAX and have been for years. Each quarter, without fail, my quarterly has gone up in price.
I’m not sure i am analogizing the wrong data: IPR speed and UX are good on some tasks, but they won’t get images converged sooner, and not everyone can call it done when a single frame has been produced, and fewer still are the ones calling a job “Final” by themselves.
Convergence speed is as important, for example, as overall flexibility (read: shader types, extended support for plugins, geometry types, image formats and so on), to the things you mentioned above, for those which require higher throughput, and need to achieve it in a more structured manner (read: renderfarm, proper post, and so on).
Part of what i mentioned earlier as being six of one and half a dozen of the other, or “evening out”.
Mind you, i’m not stating UX and ultimate performance are mutually exclusive, but some choices will favour one at the expense of the other, often enough (f.e. choice of sampler, complexity/depth of an acceleration structure, and so on.).
Nor we ever discounted the feedback gotten from users as “nonsense”: on the contrary we cherish and treasure that which is given, and all the more so when it’s done in a structured and well-argumented way.
If we dig a bit, at times, often is to make sure we understand it well, and find ways to make it actionable upon.
but at 240 euros a year it’s impossible to say no to.
But wait, wasn’t the lack of ownership a problem in itself?
Or was it only an issue because of the amounts to be spent?
thats just it, you are looking at it from a technical point of view. Yes all those thing you mention are important and Technically Vray is fantastic, I am agreeing with you, BUT the UX needs some attention.
A while ago I listened to a fantastic podcast (unfortunately it was a Modo modcast with Brad Peebler that is no longer available) about UX and software design. The basic take away I got from it was “you know you have a good UI when it is invisible to the UX”. Vray has a long way to go before the UI is invisible.
What kinds of things are not user friendly in VRay in terms of UX compared to Corona? I know it’s difficult to quantify, but can you give some examples?
Although it’s much improved in recent versions, I still find myself messing about with settings (min. Shading Rate, Noise Threshold etc) in Vray. Where as in Corona, 9/10 times I just press render and wait till it looks good enough.
But wait, wasn’t the lack of ownership a problem in itself?
Or was it only an issue because of the amounts to be spent?
Not sure what you mean here.
Anyway, I installed the Vray Next trial last night to do some tests as I’d only used it on a 1080 and not a 1080ti and thought that it’s not a good idea to make a comparison before having tested both.
Now you are biased.
Modo’s UI is *all but* invisible, Peebler was being a wee bit hyperbolic, as for his usual self.
Corona has plenty of settings, and the forum’s chock full of people with this or that issue which is UI/UX related.
Choosing to ignore it and forcing a point is unfair debating, as it leverages perception, but not objective data.
Show me precise examples (in another thread perhaps) and we may talk in ways leading to actionable items.
Counting UI items needed to get to a final render is easy enough.
Mind you, i’m not stating UX and ultimate performance are mutually exclusive, but some choices will favour one at the expense of the other, often enough (f.e. choice of sampler, complexity/depth of an acceleration structure, and so on.).
I said the opposite of “we only care abut the technical bit”, but somehow i removed one part of the reasoning, and it got lost into the language, and the finer point i was making.
We care, have cared, about UX for the past few years, and an active mandate, not a side-kick.
That the effort can’t be immediately as far reaching as some users want is a given, as coding properly takes time (cfr. the new VFB), but i find it a bit odd that we should -still!- be thrown under the bus in this comprehensive way.
Although it’s much improved in recent versions, I still find myself messing about with settings (min. Shading Rate, Noise Threshold etc) in Vray. Where as in Corona, 9/10 times I just press render and wait till it looks good enough.
But, MSR shouldn’t be touched.
Noise threshold either, unless your noise level is bad.
Default V-Ray settings will take an (and nearly *any* with 100 max subdivs.) interior render to visible cleanliness, so if you decide to use it differently from what we’ve been suggesting for the past *five years* perhaps you should re-evaluate where the issue is, for it ain’t with us.
That you’re just “happy” to let Corona take its time tells me more about your personal inclination than it does about UX or technical differences between products.
As to my question about ownership: the thread’s title suggests people are worried about greedy Chaos not giving them ownership options (ie. permanent licenses).
So i was asking if renting from someone else is fine, provided it ain’t Chaos?
You shouldn’t have to mess with min shading rate anymore, not for a long time (I think Vlado is planning on hiding it from the interface at this point). The noise threshold is a super basic performance setting that Corona has too, and the default setting in VRay is very sensible (you can always change it if you disagree). Even then, the IPR works like you’re describing out of the box. I feel like you might be judging VRay based on how it used to be, not how it is now? Is there anything more substantial or general about the UX that isn’t working for you?
edit: Lele beat me to it
I never said I had a problem with CG switching to a subscription model, so not sure where you got that from.
Default V-Ray settings will take an (and nearly *any* with 100 max subdivs.) interior render to visible cleanliness, so if you decide to use it differently from what we’ve been suggesting for the past *five years* perhaps you should re-evaluate where the issue is, for it ain’t with us.
That you’re just “happy” to let Corona take its time tells me more about your personal inclination than it does about UX or technical differences between products.
Where have you been suggesting this? And what “exactly” do you think my personal inclination is? Want to be any more condescending whilst you’re at it? Maybe there’s a check box I can tick somewhere.
Funny, the podcast may have been hosted by Brad, but it wasn’t about Modo it was about UX in general and it is exactly Modo’s UX why i don’t use Modo.
my point also has been lost in the language, what I meant, as pointed out Corona and Vray use very similar if not the same tech and achieve similar, if not the same results and time frames so maybe make the point of difference be UX, of which vray could do with more refining.
Just going to copy and paste my comment from another thread at the start of the year about perpetual vs. rental.
To offer a countering opinion, I think it depends on how well it’s handled.
For full price licensing look at Houdini - they offer different tiers for different customers and very reasonable pricing for freelancers (earning less than $100k). Most importantly you still get all the same features.
For subscriptions look at Corona - it’s cheap enough that it doesn’t even matter it’s a subscription service and you still have the option to buy outright.
For somewhere in between look at Allegorithmic - you can pay a monthly subscription that pays off the cost of owning the software, pay X months and then you own the software.
I don’t think the solution is one or the other but having multiple options available and understanding that no two customers are the same is definitely better.
It being the thread title, i assumed whose which wrote had a gripe with the licensing model.
My bad.
Where have you been suggesting this? And what “exactly” do you think my personal inclination is? Want to be any more condescending whilst you’re at it? Maybe there’s a check box I can tick somewhere.
We suggested this *every single time* issues cropped up (which weren’t bugs).
On the forums, in private email exchanges, through youtube (Vlado himself.). Short of newscasts, i think it’s been a singular note we struck from the release of 3.3 onwards. Have a search for my posts on this forum which have “MSR” in them, and come after 3.3, you’ll know.
I’m being matter-of-factly here, and as analytical as i can be, not condescending at all.
We hide controls you’d rather unhide and spend time tweaking, but the issue goes away when you use Corona, which you are happy to let run to the end (assumed in inference: without touching a thing otherwise, unlike with us.).
That is clearly not a technical issue from our part, but an attitude issue from yours (not bad attitude. inclination, however you’d like to call it.).
On the lookout for actionable items, here, i’d come away with one solution: remove said controls entirely from the UI, so to not have personal preference and (old!) biases taint the rendering experience.
Which, of course, is impossible in practice.
off the top of my head an example of workflows that could be improved would be vrays version of Coronas “Light Mixer”. You are required to render out a whole bunch of render passes, composite them in your favorite compositor, play with it there, then go back to Vray to try emulate what you have in the compositor. A bit convoluted and pretty much a uni-directional workflow.
whereas in Corona, once you set up the light mixer, you play away, if you like it, bake the changes back to the scene (making it Bi-Directional) or save the new image, saving scene states for later re-rendering if needed.
Now I am using light mixer as an example of how you have this great technology but its not as intuitive and user friendly as it could be. I am also not say that Corona’s light mixer is perfect either, it could do with further development too.