Chaos Group - 3ds Max + Maya
ASGVIS - Rhino 3D + SketchUP
LAUBlab - Cinema 4D
For every aplication, version of V-ray exists, but what if you work in any conbination of mantioned applications and you want to have one rendering engine, V-ray of course. As far as I know, you have to buy vray as many times as many application you are using. I guess it will be more fair ( also compared to Fryrender or Maxwell ) to pay just for one rendering engine and if required, pay for the implementations to each aplication.
Is V-ray STAND ALONE a solution to this?
The different connections for Maxwell and Fryrender are all developed by the same companies so they are able to leverage the price paid for one of the plugins and distribute it among the rest.
We don’t have the resources to develop all the connections ourselves though. It is like with mental ray - you can buy 3ds Max, Maya and XSI and for each of them you will pay the price for the included mental ray - you don’t get a discount on Maya because you already have mental ray for 3ds Max.
Further on, the connections of Maxwell and Fryrender are quite simplistic - usually their main goal is to get you out of the modelling application and into the standalone Maxwell/Fryrender as quickly as possible. Therefore the integration with the host application is only at the very basic level (no support for the native shaders etc). On the other hand, our integrations try to support as much of the host program as possible without changing your workflow, while adding all the bells and whistles of V-Ray (e.g. V-Ray lights, materials, cameras etc).
With that said, we may be able to do something about the connections that we develop at Chaos Group (these cover 3ds Max, Maya and XSI).
What is on my mind, is to pay to ChaosGroup for engine and pay to connection developer for that connection.
I guess, the solution wil be to offer V-ray Stand Alone and you can buy as many connection for applications as you need. Is this possible or will it be possible in near future?
Well it is possible with VRay Standalone. The Problem with the Standalone is that you loose the nifty tight integration as vlado mentioned. Unless you re-implement all the native stuff as a vray plugin and include it with the connection. An example would be max’s procedural maps. These wont work in the Standalone of course unless you bake them to a bitmap or re-implement them as Standalone plugins.
So this means that it is not as simple as I think? For example, for the implementation to Cinema 4D, e.g. with native support of Cinema shaders, some changes to the V-ray core has been made?
In fact, for the 3ds Max procedurals specifically, we already have V-Ray equivalents to many of them. They don’t render identically (e.g. the noise patterns are different), but the overall look is quite close.
The point is, that you *can* use the native Cinema 4D shaders without changes to the V-Ray core itself. If V-Ray was not as tightly integrated, this would not have been possible.
What is interestig for me is to use and to continue using V-ray for my work, but I am looking to migrate to different application(s), Cinema4D + Rhino3D + SketchUp.
What regards of any special functions (special shaders …), that comes with tight integration. I never came to using them for my work, I am sticked to V-ray shader (interior and exterior architecture and design renderings).
So is it possible to have such an environment right now, with V-Ray stand alone and connection to each aplication?
