Maxwell and V-Ray for Rhino

#1

Has anyone had the pleasure of using V-Ray or Maxwell inside of the Rhino interface? How does it compare with using these render engines in a program like Max? I like the idea of using V-Ray directly in Rhino but I’m worried about the lack of fine controls for the meshing of Nurbs models in Rhino, and how Rhino handles lots of geometry versus Max. I understand Rhino has blocks for instancing but how this compares with Max’s instancing I don’t know. If anybody has some experience here, I would like to hear about it.

#2

hi there,

I use Rhino for all my modelling.
Renderings I do in Maya (therefor i have no idea about using Vray) and Maxwell.
Sincerly you can forget about using Maxwell within Rhino…export your file to Maxwell and get used to the interface of it. You will have better results in shorter time (…always talking about “short” in maxwell terms). I personally hate the integration of renderers in Rhino (also Flamingo…) as much as I love it for modelling.
Regarding the Meshing: it’s not that big problem if you have a serious workstation: you just keep the polycounts high enough. For shure any NURBS mdell requires a very high polycount compared to a modell made out of polygons just right from the start.
That’s why I sticked to maya (superb support of step files), but anyway never have had an issue with the Maxwell exporter and it’s image quality is superb!

regards

#3

Just wanted to point out that every owner of rhino 4 can download for free a beta version of brazil 2.
http://splutterfish.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=33
Here more info. There are renderings too, some sample here:
http://splutterfish.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21306

#4

EDIT:double post, sorry.

#5

V-ray for Rhino is brilliant. It has no where near the functionality of max but is improving dramatically. GI is so simple its amazing… the reflection/refraction is fantastic and because it is a limited version (compared to V-ray in max) you can’t really go wrong, its just easy and intuitive. However, the trouble starts when you want to do more complicated renders.

That being said I still do all my rendering in max. V-ray for rhino is amazing if you are just starting out… or you have no real need for inspiring renders - as in, you only need to render products for presentations not full blown character animation.

So my suggestion to you is… if you know rhino well and can’t be bothered fiddling around with mesh settings importing/exporting and the only reason you own max is to render in… then get a copy of V-ray. But, if you already know how to render in max and you need high quality renders and are just looking for a cheaper option… don’t bother with vray in rhino!

#6

Well I’ve been using Rhino since my college days and it feels very natural to me. I don’t bother with mesh settings in Rhino as I use nPower Rhino to Max. The dynamic mesh settings come into play within one of the nPower plug-in rollouts in Max, which only meshes the BREP model for rendering purposes. I do very little poly modeling in Max where I work but do some animations and all my renderings are done in there. The problem is, we have a couple of guys where I work who don’t have any of the software I use and we have been told to all use the same software for generating concepts for proposals. We render aircraft parts, furniture and whole interiors.

From past experience with meshing for just shaded mode in Rhino, I know that generating the meshes can take a bit of time with a lot of geometry. There is also no mode in Rhino to turn everything into boxes while you move about a complicated scene, like there is in Max. V-ray has no proxy feature (like it does for Max) for reducing the memory burden on a scene and Rhino has no instancing (but that may be where blocks come in). While I would certainly recommend that we all just use the Rhino, Max, V-Ray scenario, I know they’re going to wonder why they just can’t add V-Ray to Rhino rather than buy 2 more seats of Max (or Viz) and 2 more seats of V-Ray and 2 more seats of Rhino to Max. Maxwell could be used as the other guys use SolidWorks but my understanding is that this renderer is a non-biased renderer so you’ll run into problems if you’re on a short deadline and need a rendering relatively fast.

Finally, I could recommend that we just use the Mental Ray renderer in Max but I don’t know how that really compares with V-Ray. I know that the licensing structure for MR wasn’t as good at one time, when considering distributed rendering nodes, as V-Ray is. Whether they are both on equal footing concerning licensing and rendering ability is something I don’t really know yet.

Ultimately, I believe I have a good argument for continuing my work flow and suggesting they inherit it, but I just want to make sure that I don’t short change the V-Ray plugin for Rhino. I played with the demo for a bit but I didn’t like it compared to the Max workflow and I’m particulary worried that everything will come crashing down if we try to render whole interiors with it.

#7

With all due respect, but this is no more the case. From the point when JD Hill took over the plugin development, the Rhino plugin got very useable ). Have you tried a recent built (later than Feb 07? Does not seem so.

Holger

#8

but still not for me, sorry.
But however, Maxwell Studio or Plugin, it’s only a matter of workflow as you have anyway both options.
Wha counts at the end of the day are the fantastic results we can achieve with Maxwell…:wink:

regards

#9

I completly agree with Hoja, Maxwell is complety and perfectly integrated with Rhino right now, you can do everything that maxwell Studio does inside Rhino and in my opinion even easier than in Studio. Great job by JDHill!

#10

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