Superfinicky

Hi Guys,

I'm new to Max, however I noticed that a ton of people use SU and Vray. Any advantages to VRAY over Max other than price?????

Kindest regards,

Ori

david.jones

This is an often asked question. Heres a feel for what opinions exist.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/.../t-373784.html

Personally i began using mental ray, but later moved over to vray because it had better online community support, and included vrmeshes, an awesome feature for rendering massive poly counts, ie trees, in sensible frame times. Note that the newest version of mental ray now does the same, apparently.

The gnomon tutorials are an awesome place to start getting to grips with vray.

http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/dvds/cni01.html

http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/dvds/cni02.html

Superfinicky

Thanks David, I appreciate your reply. I've been really having a hard time rendering anything useful! I'll look forward to checking out Global Illumination.

Best,

OG

creasia

I have tried to get Sketchup to replace 3DS max by using the Maxwell Render Plugin. Although my results have been quite nice, rendering, mapping and scene creation are a great challenge compared to Max. These factors have caused me to take about 30% longer to produce a final rendering.

I would say that Sketchup has some great advantages with regards to precision modeling. There is even a new plugin on smustard.com that enables "Subdivide and Smooth" modeling which is very nice.

There are some obvious limitations. Sketchup has very limited mapping abilities, and it has difficulty handling larger scenes with high polygon counts.

manish_mv

Hi everyone I am a architectural visualisation manager in a reputed company. whatever i m going to say now is completely keeping in mind architectural visualisation need only.

I ve been using both the rendering engines for many years ( approx 4yrs)

I started with MR first of all tried to do a lot of things sometimes i do get the results. then i started trying vray. Vray is something really standouts as i saw its light cache (called light map at that time) gi engine. later i realised that light cache has its limitations then i started discovering vrays materials they were very good and yields results really very fast especially its reflections and refractions then i continued using it doing lots of great job for around two years. I was really happy with the output doing as much as 40 different renderings. I got really hands on all of its lights, raytracing, irradiance, QMC, antialiasing, displacements, etc. and did all of the optimisations for different-2 situations. So it is true Vray is really something we can call professional for architectural works.

Now on the other hand Mental ray is completely different as per its internal calculations lighting and GI techniques and uses also for example rendering a million trees using opacity maps is much much faster in mental ray as compared to any other rendering engine used for architectural purpose. when i got quiet comfortable with vrays output is i tried to do one interior bathroom rendering using mental ray because MR had then just come up with its special architectural shaders did a bit more fight on setting up lights and other stuffs and started taking some test renders and mind it results were unbeatable the way the GI behaves in mental ray is really appreciatable. yeah even timing wise it is considerably faster than vray if the kind of quality output we try to build in it. Then i realised that it is something we shud never miss to learn about then time came to do bit more on it so my latest development on it is a fully working steel plant on the shore of an ocean.

It is true that there are comparatively much higher number of vray users because it is bit easier to learn (in my opinion) and work on. but mental has its own concepts of working especially its approach to GI calculations i.e. photons plus final gathering which is very much close to the real world distribution of light gives much better results.

so in my opinion with the proper knowledge u can generate much better output using mental ray and vray is easier to learn and gives good results in less time.

thanks

STRAT

you cant really claim one software is better than the next, it's dangerous to do that. it's your choice. it's the old excuse but most true - the quality of the image is with the artist. the chosen software is just a tool.

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Kyle

I totally agree. Couldn't have put it better myself....well maybe a little bit

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manta

I used to think that way, but I think you're going to see alot more great work done with MR now and in the future, not because the artists have got much better, but because the tool itself did, I can attest to the fact that I can now use MR and get really good results very quickly, and haven't put any extra effort into it, I still use Vray, but I could use MR at anytime now and feel comfortable with it...its much easier to use and more predictable than it ever was ... just my two cents...

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Horhe

Yet another "which is better thread"

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Brian Bradley

I think it would be fair to say though that the ability to use
Vray has already given you a lot of the info and understanding
you need to be able to work with MR. Hence it is still the artist
that is the REALLY important part of the equation. Heck I've
seen some Awful stuff with produced with MR by guys who feel
they know the software well.


regards
Bri

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