Arnold vs Vray?

[Steve Davy]

Finally ready to jump ship from mental ray. Looking at either Arnold or Vray. I've so far played around with Vray and am impressed at the ease that I can get pretty decent quality GI images, compared to the nightmare that setting up something similar in MR would be. I've not yet used Arnold but have watched some tutorial videos and it also looks pretty nice.

Anyone used both and have any feedback on pros and cons of each?

Matt, you've had quite a bit to say about renderers in the past? :)

[matt estela]

ha!

depends of course. :)

if you like the ability to spin knobs and push buttons, vray.

if you want a render to be as simple as possible (but no simpler), arnold.

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[Sid]

I think Matt is pretty much right, but I'll add one more thing.

If you've got loads of render farm nodes, Arnold. If you don't, Vray.

With Arnold, there's next to NO opportunity to cache illumination, so you calculate everything from scratch for every frame. Vray has many, many more options for optimisation, so you can get away with a smaller farm.

Sid

[Keith Rogers]

I agree with Sid there.

[Phinnaeus OConnor]

I've been using Vray pretty much on every job for the last two years and I've been very happy with the results.

Feedback from the Mill commercial guys who are delving into Arnold when I was last there is that is great for big GI exterior stuff but not so good for interiors.

It also doesn't do proper refraction yet as far as I know.

Maybe Sid can chime in here...

P

 

Phinnaeus O'Connor Ltd

3D Animation for TV and Film

https://vimeo.com/user5376333/videos

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From: matt estela <ma...@tokeru.com>
To: "maya...@googlegroups.com" <maya...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, 3 September 2013, 6:47
Subject: Re: [maya_he3d] Arnold vs Vray?

[sid]

Phin - Arnold doesn't do proper refraction? Care to elaborate?

Yeah, The big exterior shots with a strong direct light source is when Arnold works well. The trouble comes when you do an interior and try to rely on lighting that set using realistic methods - i.e. (typical room with a window scenario) sky dome, some direct light and then all interior bounce. Don't even bother. What most people don't realise is that if you light your interior as if it was a live action set, Arnold can handle it a lot better. 

A good live action example of what I'm talking about:

http://www.puppetcraft.co.uk/images/brains%20film%20set.jpg

Light like this, and you'll be fine! :P

Sid

[Phinnaeus OConnor]

Hey Sid, thanks for the feedback, I'd definitely like to try it out.

Regarding refraction, I've personally not tried it, just someone mentioned they had problems with it the other day.

 

Phinnaeus O'Connor Ltd

3D Animation for TV and Film

https://vimeo.com/user5376333/videos

---

From: sid <sur...@gmail.com>
To: maya...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, 3 September 2013, 12:17

[sid]

Hmm, I'd be curious to know the refraction problems you speak of. I've done quite a lot of work with Arnold in the past couple of years, and haven't found anything "critical" with refractions as of yet. Might break if you decided to get a bit bonkers complex, but then again, Arnold is still in "Public Beta" :P (I'm sure that's the excuse Solid Angle would give, anyway!)

Sid

[Keith Rogers]

Show me a renderer that does glossy refractions quick and I'll show you my.. er something.  I'll buy you a coffee.

[matt estela]

I should point out I haven't used either vray or arnold in production, I'm just an angry bystander shaking my fist at young upstarts on my prman porch.

The point about size of farm is a good one. My initial glib statement was a hint at workflow preference. I know people who use mentalray, and put it into  maximum brute force pathtracer mode, mia shade all the things, sit back and wait for grainy images to fall out the other end. If thats how you work, you'll dig arnold.

If you like to tweak and tweak and cache and realtime preview and demand bleeding edge cool toys and fun, vray. Reading their updates they're definitely in the fun end of the pool, always implementing cutting edge tech, new interesting things based on user requests. 

Arnold quietly and steadily works towards making brute force pathtracing handle 99% of what people need to render, in a (almost) reasonable timeframe, as simply as possible. The fact that it can now handle full raytraced GI hair grown off a SSS head in a cornell box filled with a fluid smoke sim, without sweating, is staggering.

Render times and noise are what they are, my take is their pure pathtracer vision juuuuuuuust exceeds what some folk would be comfortable with render-time wise on current hardware. I like that solidangle are fine with that, any time users ask for the ability to cache this or pointcloud that, its quickly shot down. And it seems true that the extra time you spend on the farm, you save in artist time by not tweaking and fiddling settings. Place your lights, hit render, walk away.

Both companies from what I recall will happily give you trial licences if you're serious about buying (note that solidangle has something like a 5 seat minimum purchase), worth testing them both, see how they work for you.

No matter what you choose, it'll be a fantastic step away from mentalray. :)

[matt estela]

On 3 September 2013 22:14, Keith Rogers <keithrog...@gmail.com> wrote:

Show me a renderer that does glossy refractions quick and I'll show you my.. er something.  I'll buy you a coffee.

 

Ours does. Nyah.  :)

[Stefan Andersson]

upload source code or it didn't happen!

;)

/s

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Stefan Andersson | Digital Janitor

[Keith Rogers]

VRay 3.0 is going to be amazing if all accounts are true.  Speed increases all over the shop.  The trouble we have here is we run maya and soft and having just chose VRay over Arnold it's a little bit behind with soft still but it's pretty well supported.  Chaos group online support is a brilliant to.  Pretty sure Vlado never sleeps.

[Keith Rogers]

Flat white yeh?

[Keith Rogers]

Hey Stef.

[Stefan Andersson]

Hey Keith,

:)

/s

[matt estela]

make mine a soy piccolo.

part of what makes our fast stuff faster is some render tech loosely based off the embree raytracer code from intel, which is now in vray and c4d. 

contrived c4d demo for speed comparisons:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJd-WEtkg-Q

[Dillon Bailey]

Here was one test I did with V-Ray and Arnold for exterior shot. The render times for Arnold were significantly faster. The interiors with Arnold (using natural light setups) still need some help. All raytracers struggle with interior renders with few localized indirect light sources.

http://pixelblackbox.blogspot.com/2012/10/arnold-vs-v-ray-significant-difference.html

[ctjanney]

We've been using VRay in production since we did the first round of titles for Game of Thrones and haven't looked back at MR since.  We also just finished two spots with Massive using VRay.  I will say the renders out of Arnold are amazing, but you'll need a big farm and you wont get the level of customer service we get from Chaos Group for VRay.

If you have a large render farm, and you want to write  your own shaders and you have a decent timeline to get renders out (not the quick turnaround of commercials), I would evaluate Arnold.  The robots and monsters in Pac Rim were all rendered in Arnold.  The environments were rendered in VRay, so they are both very good renderers.  It really comes down to how much time and skill you have to monkey around with the settings, and how much horse power you have to get your elements out.

Did I mention the cost?  You'll want to evaluate the cost as well.

-ctj

[Steve Davy]

Thanks for all the feedback guys. Sounds like Vray is the hands down winner for my situation. I'm currently an individual freelancer, with a minimal render farm and not normally working on real-world lighting scenarios.

Though I like the sound of Arnold's simplicity! One day soon there will be a renderer that has nothing but a "render" button in the settings (I hope!).

And Matt, yeah I am looking forward to saying bye bye to MR.

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Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2013 08:17:33 -0700
From: ctja...@gmail.com
To: maya...@googlegroups.com
CC: stevi...@hotmail.com
Subject: [maya_he3d] Re: Arnold vs Vray?

[Tim Leydecker]

Hey Steve,

you�ll like VRay�s then.

Make sure to google/youtube the Nederhorst settings as a start
and bookmark spot3d.com

Whith VRay, it is worth understanding that you can actually
run it entirely via setting a global Threshold value but then
should at least check your AA filter type and radius for what
it�ll do inside that threshold bounds.

You may actually find Gauss 3 sexy when cleaning out motionblur,
giving you better results at higher threshold settings than a
default Area 1.5 setting.

Personally, I tend to default to Triangle 2 for no specific reason
to start with except maybe to make sure I fully AA- sample two adjacent pixels
even at threshold settings around 0.1 for fast and surprisingly decent previews
(often good enough for half-res comp setups).

In my biased opionion, the way transparency is created in a material using the
refraction index is not ideal for art-directed content, where you may want to
have that exact look of refractions but just a bit more or less opacity here or there.
That is purely a personal preference and also applies to specular/reflection highlights.

Sometimes, it would be more convenient to have a simple, solid phong/blinn/phongE type
shader to get at "old-school" results more quickly.

Don�t use the Maya shader nodes (lambert, etc) with VRay, they don�t sample as clean and are slow,
resort to use a default VRay material and make sure to check the effects of disabling Reflection
and Reflection or reducing the default raydepth of those right from the start.

Cheers,

tim

On 03.09.2013 21:16, Steve Davy wrote:
> Thanks for all the feedback guys. Sounds like Vray is the hands down winner for my situation. I'm currently an individual freelancer, with a minimal render farm and not normally
> working on real-world lighting scenarios.
>
> Though I like the sound of Arnold's simplicity! One day soon there will be a renderer that has nothing but a "render" button in the settings (I hope!).
>
> And Matt, yeah I am looking forward to saying bye bye to MR.
>

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Ryan O'Phelan]

We have used vray for four years now,  and are looking at Arnold. Vray is definitely in the hot seat right now,  and a there's a lot at stake with vray 3.0.  There's a new progressive engine that should be comparable to Arnold when it launches. Probably a little slower but in that direction. There's also a promise of a new SSS shader that may rival Arnold 's very nice SSS treatment. 

Both renderers have noise issues but they manifest differently.  Vray has trouble with irradiance flicker.  Arnold has noise associated with brute force. Final renders for both get expensive,  but Arnold is faster.

Arnold is also about twice the price,  I've been told,  though I haven't seen a price list. 

Arnold has almost no support unless you are a large client,  while Chaosgroup has great support,  and a great community. 

R

[Janak Thakker]

"Arnold has almost no support unless you are a large client"

I don't know what your experience with the Arnold support is but every time I've been in touch they've had really short turnarounds for fixes and stuff. And I'm just a one man band...

//J

___________________________________________________

janak thakker | web: http://www.fatlittleindianboy.com/

cell (SWE): +46(0)733 900 984

[Christopher Stewart]

On Mon, Sep 2, 2013 at 10:47 PM, matt estela <ma...@tokeru.com> wrote:

if you like the ability to spin knobs and push buttons, vray.

It's great to have them, but all the buttons and knobs can get a little tedious after awhile. A couple of script sets exist which consolidate common settings and writing your own up isn't very hard. An option in small scale environments, probably a must in large. Render element sets, matte sets and some perhaps some common studio and/or project-based render settings.

I haven't played with Arnold, but have been pretty satisfied with V-Ray the last couple of years, in both features and episodic television. 

-- 
----
Christopher Stewart
Vancouver, BC
3D TD | VFX  IT

[Steve Davy]

I must admit I'm finding VRay's render settings a bit more tedious to navigate even than MR's -- for example even finding toggles like VRFB on and off is difficult, although I guess after going to the wrong place 500 times maybe I'll learn.

The Nederhorst settings seem to be *incredibly* slow to render. And this is with a fairly simple test scene with HDR lighting and a textured dome light, with a few primitives a couple of which have SSS turned on.

I need to go over as many tutorials as I can find, obviously, but I'm already finding noise to be a serious issue with the SSS objects, even though frame-by-frame the renders look good, over an animation they flicker like crazy.

Anyone got any tips for a total newbie about how to fix this? Have tried tweaking just about every global and shader sampling setting I can find and run tests, still can't get rid of the flicker (not actually even sure if it's a refraction or light sampling problem).

---

From: stonesou...@gmail.com
Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 08:56:16 -0700

Subject: Re: [maya_he3d] Arnold vs Vray?

To: maya...@googlegroups.com

[Keith Rogers]

Hey Steve.  Couple of things I've learned in the few years using VRay for maya is the Nederhorst settings are a little dated even by his own admission.  And rendering animation without flicker can only be done with brute force.  Unless only the camera moves.  Even then by the time you've buggered about setting up IR maps and the rest you might as well use Brute.  Some decent places for info are 

http://www.workshop.mintviz.com/category/tutorials/animation/ and http://renderstuff.com/free-rendering-cg-tutorials/  both use max but most of the info in relevant to maya.  

Hope this helps

[Keith Rogers]

Also joining the chaos group forum is a must.  Tonnes of good info there including fast feedback from other users including the man who made it Vlado.