Hi Ryan,
When I work as a consultant to a studio who requires that I use Vray, I prefer Vray.
There are several things that discourage me about Vray. These things pertain only to me and my experience with Vray, and have nothing to do with the experience or output of anyone else in the Vray community. Nor are these things sited as intended to imply or convince anyone that fryrender is a better product than Vray. But the stumbling points for me are: a myriad of GI settings, AA choices, Color Mapping choices, reliance on LWF, loss of detail and secondary shadow fidelity. With the latest release, there are even
more render settings. I can't keep up. Plus, the settings are, for the most part, scene and output size specific. So they change. While I'm thinking of it, if you apply a Vray light material to an object, you have to have extremely high settings to avoid GI artifacts.
With fryrender, I don't concern myself with LWF because it works in linear space already. I choose an AA setting based on the size of the output (Detailed for images less than 1000 x n pixels, Default for anything larger, or you can disable it for fast previews). DOF is automatic and dependent on the fstop of your camera and while that is not interactive, nearly every other aspect of the image output is (as I've described in the post above).
An important personal preference of mine is to have a render engine that does not sit on top of my host application while it's rendering. Sure, you can use Backburner to send out renders, and I've used it successfully before, but I don't like the workflow. If I need to do large format output, I send it over the network via the fryrender console. I can even send it to a renderfarm straight from the console.
Speed of course, is an issue for many. Back when I used radiosity, people were dumbfounded that I would wait 11 hours for a solution - but I could render view after view at high-res in 10 minutes. People also considered GI to be a cheat - something a knowledgable person should be able to do with standard key lighting schemes and adept use of amibient. GI was also considered by one of the most admired people in this business to be not feasible for production work. As hardware evolves and when a Vray render takes 1 minute to render while the fry one takes 60, I'll still choose fryrender for my production. I've seen some of the most astonishing work in architectural viz done by artists using Vray, and I take nothing away from them by saying that I prefer to use fryrender.
So, that's the short answer. Do you want the long one?
