Hi, guys I have been trying to settle upon one renderer. I had been using Mental Ray for quite a long time now. But now i want to change over to V ray. I was hoping if someone can pin point any specialities that Vray has over Mental ray. Also I made this video for BFX competetion and rendered CG objects in Mental Ray. Are there any specific issues with the render that could have been eradicated if I would have used Vray.
Thank you
V-Ray just makes sense. It’s easy. I switched back in 2009 and there is zero reason to go back. Vlado and the devs are AWESOME when it comes to help.
But on the other hand there will be people here that will recommend you use mental ray and swear by it. That’s fine. I think both options are right.
Your best option is to download the V-Ray demo for Maya and test it out and make up your own mind. You can organise with them to get a fully functioning demo if you find the public one on their site too limiting.
I agree that core Mental Ray users might not feel any necessity of jumping over to V ray as even I thought I can do evrything in Mental Ray. Untill I found few issues that I could not solve no mater what tricks I used. But one presentater from The Chaos group showed me how easy it was in V ray. From then I made up mind to learn Vray. Hence, I am really interested in knowing what would be key differences and challenges in doing so for a core Mental ray user.
Okay - they are similar but if I’m interpreting your question correctly the key difference and challenge, in my opinion, is the DMC sampler and how V-Ray works with noise, AA and samples.
Maybe mental ray has a similar system now in unified sampling but I haven’t been up to date with mr, so I’m not sure;
http://interstation3d.com/tutorials/vray_dmc_sampler/demistyfing_dmc.html
Anyway that is a good read and if you can get your head around it - that’s the main core of V-Ray and how it works and coming across from mental it is a good primer to how it works in the most technical sense of rendering.
Apart from that, they are similar with both having monolithic shaders etc…I think all your mr skills would easily be transferred across.
Unified Sampling, along with the mip production shaders and native IBL light emission, and Id say mr is finally giving vray a run for its money…
Im getting up to speed with vray now, but my overall impression right now is that unified sampling is faster than vrays DMC for a similar quality/noise level. But Im not so great at optimizing vray so this is just my brute force conclusion right now…
David Hacket (bitter) used to write up some great stuff on mental rays new features (this stuff has been hidden in maya since 2012), I think he could summarize their similarities better than I could
I have been testing them as well, and I am a long time mr user. Indeed, I found the DMC sampler to take some getting used to, but for the most part vray is easy to get into once you’re familiar with mr.
However, I did find some differences in render speeds for similar quality images, with mr being decidedly faster in many situations. This applies especially when clean shadows are required with minimal noise.
While I also liked the vray distributed rendering setup much better than the mr satellite system, the mr satellites seemed to render consistently faster as well, and play a more efficient part in the process. This is very important to me, as I work mostly with high resolution images that benefit tremendously from distributed bucket rendering in a render farm.
Another feature that I had problems with was actually fur. This is an area where 3dsmax seems to have an advantage over maya when it comes to vray. Since vray does not support the native maya fur, and since its maya integration does not have any kind of easy to use grooming tools, I found it to be pretty useless in this regard. Yes, there is the option of rendering fur with mr, with separate passes, and compositing. Also, I understand that vray is going to support the new xgen system in maya, which might negate this problem once I make the switch in my fur pipeline to xgen.
A big advantage that I found with vray over mr currently was in its progressive rendering system and the vray render buffer. Although I understand that autodesk is working on a proper integration of progressive rendering for mr, it’s well overdue. The IPR has been more of a gimmick than a real help. Then there is spraytrace available for mr, just as vray supports yeti when it comes to fur, but these are additional purchases to be made. Vray’s render buffer is very lovely to work with, and it makes the maya render view window feel even more dated than it is, even with the new features that they have added. I love having the history buffer get saved too, with the render times info.
Yes, mr has mentalcore available as well, but as an additional expense, and it comes with its own limitations due to lack of popularity and dependence on mr integration.
All in all, I still don’t find it to be an easy decision to make. I do appreciate the advances made with mr, and I can live with many of its quirks if it means that it has faster render speeds and better support of maya features. For others, the ease of use in vray makes up for its downsides in maya. Just remember that vray has a lot of its popularity due to its integration with 3dsmax, where it has a significantly bigger advantage over mentalray.