Who has switched to Vray and loves it?

[Marc-Andre Carbonneau]

Hi,

I’m wondering who has switched to VRay for Softimage completely and loves it.

I don’t seem to see much commercials or movies stating they have used Vray for Softimage. Has it picked up?

Now, after a few months now, how does it compare to Arnold? Why have you picked VRay instead of Arnold?

How’s Vray’s “buy one get 5 free for your farm” working for you?

 

Thanks.

Marc-Andre

 

 

 

[olivier jeannel]

Can't really answer. But Vray is on my "to buy "list. Arnold is out of budget, and the learning curve is thick. I mean, there is a lot to read on the mailing list (It's not a crit, the list is super active and people are nice).

[Oliver Weingarten]

Hey Marc-Andre!

Well, I´m using Vray since two years (also the beta) for certain projects, not for all. It performed quite well. I like the integration and the concept of having identical parameters over all the different packages. That way you can easily adapt tuts from other application. I like the look Vray generates and I like the straight forward setup of a scene. You will get nice results really quick.
The five rendernodes are cool, and I think, you get 5 more standalone rendernodes (for Vray archives), if I got it correct...
Currently setting it up for my own little "render backyard". I think you get a good renderer for your money. Support is excellent and very responsive on bugreports and other stuff...very nice guys ;)

cheers,
oli

[Mirko Jankovic]

Hmm I found Arnold learning curve to be really really short and in less than a week you can be production ready. 

[Alan Fregtman]

I agree with you. It's way easier than mentalray.

[olivier jeannel]

Well, I easily found some videos showing "click here", enter "this
value" for Vray. While there were buttons in Arnold, I was really not
sure of what I was doing.
But to tell the truth, I really did not try a lot.

Le 21/06/2012 22:15, Mirko Jankovic a �crit :

[Steffen Dünner]

There are _a lot_ more buttons in Vray than in Arnold! ;)

The combination of GI algorithms ( primary / secondary) alone is intimidating.

The funny thing in Arnold is that the result most of the time converges to the same image, only the rendertime varies if you e.g. shoot rays that you don't actually need to sample or have useless diffuse rays bounce inside your glass objects.

Optimizing Arnold scenes can be a time consuming process as well, but it's not mandatory to get a result. It's only mandatory if you need a result "in time". ;)

I remember the not so good old mental ray times where optimizing scenes made the difference between a rendered image and a crashing renderfarm. But on the other hand I kind of masochistically liked the challenge of pushing the right buttons.

Cheers

Steffen

2012/6/21 olivier jeannel <olivier...@noos.fr>

Well, I easily found some videos showing "click here", enter "this value" for Vray. While there were buttons in Arnold, I was really not sure of what I was doing.
But to tell the truth, I really did not try a lot.

Le 21/06/2012 22:15, Mirko Jankovic a écrit :

Hmm I found Arnold learning curve to be really really short and in less than a week you can be production ready.

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[Kamen Lilov]

I'd like to chime in to this discussion.

What are the things in VRay/XSI you hate most? A missing feature, clumsy configuration, poor documentation, any kinds of instabilities, etc?

Disclosure: I run the XSI integration team at ChaosGroup so, obviously, I am not impartial to this discussion. But I am keen on making the product work well for all you VFX folks out there :) and I can take criticism. Shoot at will :)

[Eric Thivierge]

I'm not a render / surfacing guy myself but I really appreciate your involvement in the XSI community AND for reaching out to the community for crits. Thumbs up!

--------------------------------------------
Eric Thivierge
http://www.ethivierge.com

[Simon Anderson]

I started using Arnold recently and the lurning curve is about 8 hours to get amazing results, and then maybe another 8 to actually start messing around with SSS shaders, but its raelly fast and looks amazing, at my last studio we used mental ray and switched to arnold and it was amazing, have had a look at Vray, and for me personally ill be sticking to Arnold, it just got a very strong community and rapid development. :)

--
-------------------
Simon Ben Anderson
blog: http://vinyldevelopment.wordpress.com/

[Simon Anderson]

wow my spelling this morning is astonishingly bad

[Tim Leydecker]

It�s perfectly fine for 02:00 am...

I�ve used VRay on a few seconds or maybe minutes of various car commercials,
a 15sec one-shot commercial with rendered DOF and some nastily quick
but heavy fluid sim (lighting&shading&rendering a frosted Realflow sim)
using nothing but a stinky 3 point/spec lightrig to make it look cool.

I�ve actually used it from within Maya, XSI and 3DS Max.

The DOF shot was my first fastest paced job with VRay and it cost me
a few long nights to bend VRays AA sampling to my will. It did eventually,
I just had to ask and click around alot... there was no one else around,
especially at night, so I ended up just asking the web. That�s when a
3DS Max user base comes in handy, there�s tutorials for everything...

It may still be chilling to open the render roll-out first and it is well worth
to follow the render optimization but generic render perfect settings do exist...

The links to them are somewhere on www.spot3d.com afaik.

In terms of usage, it beats mR not just because there�s someone left who cares
but because it has years and years of rinse and repeat bugfixing and responding
to artsy type (or architectural types) feature request with a click it 3DS Max backround.

Usually, it will work as advertised. Out of the box.

I don�t think many people write custom code or shaders for it.

Those guys capable are more attracted to reading and writing *.ass files currently,
probably not just because it�s still a small club to be a member in but also because
its a different kind of market, even if Arnold is kicking strong on XSI/ commercials
in, for example Hamburg(Germany). But Hamburg itself is some sort of a club as well.
(For example the EGO is great but really nothing special when you wind up in Berlin)

Moved on. I liked VRay a lot more than mental ray, even in 3Ds Max :)


Cheers,


tim

On 22.06.2012 02:00, Simon Anderson wrote:
> wow my spelling this morning is astonishingly bad
>

> On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 9:58 AM, Simon Anderson <simonbenan...@gmail.com <mailto:simonbenan...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> I started using Arnold recently and the lurning curve is about 8 hours to get amazing results, and then maybe another 8 to actually start messing around with SSS shaders, but
> its raelly fast and looks amazing, at my last studio we used mental ray and switched to arnold and it was amazing, have had a look at Vray, and for me personally ill be
> sticking to Arnold, it just got a very strong community and rapid development. :)
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 8:54 AM, Eric Thivierge <ethiv...@gmail.com <mailto:ethiv...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> I'm not a render / surfacing guy myself but I really appreciate your involvement in the XSI community AND for reaching out to the community for crits. Thumbs up!
>
> --------------------------------------------
> Eric Thivierge
> http://www.ethivierge.com
>
>
>

> On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 8:03 AM, Kamen Lilov <kamen...@chaosgroup.com <mailto:kamen...@chaosgroup.com>> wrote:
>
> __

[Nick Angus]

I think the hair shader could do with a transparency along shaft attribute, that would possibly make it look a little better/softer.

Vray proxies still seem to be a little funny, I can never figure out how to do multi-material objects (or if that is even supported)

 

But it has my vote for sure, brilliant renderer, seamlessly integrated…

 

N

[Eugen Sares]

Hi,
the most important feature for me would be a progressive-refinement-type Frame Buffer/Render Region, like VRay-RT.
This reduces light and shader-tweaking iterations to a minimum. Arnold has it, too.
Irradiance map/lightcache preview is helpful, but there should be the "final" look right from the start, without black pixels inbetween.

Regarding VRay-RT: to me, it does not make much sense to fork VRay into CPU and GPU versions, and dedicate the GPU-version only for fast preview (with missing features), and the CPU-version for final rendering.
Is this still the official approach?
From a user's standpoint, I don't want to worry about such things. If there's a GPU, use it, if not, offer progressive refinement anyway.
(I'm aware this is technically problematic. If one fine day CPU/GPU-memory gets unified, this might be the start of a new age in rendering)

Another thing: VRay tends to have a somewhat overwhelming number of parameters, so a good handful of render presets, including the "unified settings" would be appreciated.
Also, a compehensive (short but not too short) documentation on how the different render engines work and play together would be nice.
Best,
Eugen

-------- Original-Nachricht --------

Betreff:

Re: Who has switched to Vray and loves it?

Datum:	Fri, 22 Jun 2012 01:03:36 +0300
Von:	Kamen Lilov <kamen...@chaosgroup.com>
Antwort an:	soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
An:	soft...@listproc.autodesk.com

[Eugen Sares]

Hi,
the most important feature for me would be a progressive-refinement-type Frame Buffer/Render Region, like VRay-RT.
This reduces light and shader-tweaking iterations to a minimum. Arnold has it, too.
Irradiance map/lightcache preview is helpful, but there should be the "final" look right from the start, without black pixels inbetween.

Regarding VRay-RT: to me, it does not make much sense to fork VRay into CPU and GPU versions, and dedicate the GPU-version only for fast preview (with missing features), and the CPU-version for final rendering.
Is this still the official approach?
From a user's standpoint, I don't want to worry about such things. If there's a GPU, use it, if not, offer progressive refinement anyway.
(I'm aware this is technically problematic. If one fine day CPU/GPU-memory gets unified, this might be the start of a new age in rendering)

Another thing: VRay tends to have a somewhat overwhelming number of parameters, so a good handful of render presets, including the "unified settings" would be appreciated.
Also, a compehensive (short but not too short) documentation on how the different render engines work and play together would be nice.
Best,
Eugen

-------- Original-Nachricht --------

Betreff:	Re: Who has switched to Vray and loves it?
Datum:	Fri, 22 Jun 2012 01:03:36 +0300
Von:	Kamen Lilov <kamen...@chaosgroup.com>
Antwort an:	soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
An:	soft...@listproc.autodesk.com

[Sandy Sutherland]

Sorry have not used Vray - it does look really good - but would like to chip in  - Arnold is the bees knees - the stuff we are getting out is stunning, and it is doing stuff MR would have run for the hills long ago.

S.

_____________________________
Sandy Sutherland
Technical Supervisor
sandy.su...@triggerfish.co.za
_____________________________

---

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Eugen Sares [soft...@keyvis.at]
Sent: 22 June 2012 08:15
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Fwd: Re: Who has switched to Vray and loves it?

[Stefan Kubicek]

We've been using Vray for almost ten years, we started using it in version 0.74 beta in 3dsMax
and the first image I rendered had GI and DOF enabled, and it came out in PAL resolution in under a minute
with superb quality on a 700mhz AMD Athlon back then. I was blown away, bought a 1.0 license the minute it was released and never regretted it.

XSI integration is pretty good for a first release, bug fixes come in quickly, and the dev team is
responding to bug reports and feature requests on the forum usually within the day.

As a long time user I must admit that it does have more settings than Arnold, but those only play a role once you start using the various GI cheats, like Light Cache and Irradiance Map, which are nowadays, with fast computers, pretty much obsolete (I find myself brute force raytracing GI for the most part) except for interior shots where they allow you to get really fast render times, often 3-4 times faster than with Arnold/brute force for the same quality on the exact same shot.

Things I miss in Vray:

- A bug tracker thats open to paying customers and beta testers. Bugs are being reported on the forum,
some double and triple, and it's hard for a single individual keeping track of what's already fixed and what not, as well as knowing what priority the bug currently has, etc.

- Better support of ICE. I haven't used the daily builds in a while so this might have become better, but last time I checked (2-3 montsh ago) strand renders looked quite different (sometimes wrong) compared to what you get with MR, 3Delight and Arnold ootb. Sometimes it didn't render at all, depending on what compounds were used.

- As Eugen said, progressive refinement of the render region. I find myself continuously switching between AA settings just to get a quick preview (AA = 0), and higher settings. I suggested this a few months ago in their forum, but since there is no bug tracker I can't check if I was heard. If that was there I would not crave for VRayRT so much. Like Eugen, I believe that time spent on VrayRT should rather be invested in making
the Vray core faster, but I understand that the RT branch might become the next big hit once GPU and CPU are truly merged and use unified memory, or the memory bottleneck of GPU is somehow solved differently.
Is that on any CPU makers disclosed road map?

- Faster hair rendering. Quality is good, but Arnold was still faster last time I played with it.

-Faster export times, especially with ICE. Again, this might have been improved with later nigthly builds.


What I really like about Vray:

- Fast interior GI rendering is possible.
- A clear shader strategy, it comes with pretty much anything you could need out of the box. With Arnold, you very much need to resort to third party shaders (e.g. Kettle Uber).
- Similar controls and output across different 3D packages.


What I miss in Arnold:
-Light portals (if they'd help any in bringing render times down), better light transport for interiors.
-A feature complete "standard" shader.
-I was tempted to write "Nightly builds", but updates do come pretty frequently, and one can compile the latest sources if he dares to.


What I miss in both renderers:
-Volumetrics!
-Rendertime Marching Cube/Blobbies (or similar) effect for particles. I don't always want to mesh my particles
first, generating gigabytes of mesh data.






With increasing hardware speed

--
-------------------------------------------
Stefan Kubicek Co-founder
-------------------------------------------
keyvis digital imagery
Wehrgasse 9 - Grï¿œner Hof
1050 Vienna Austria
Phone: +43/699/12614231
--- www.keyvis.at ste...@keyvis.at ---
-- This email and its attachments are
--confidential and for the recipient only--

[Marc-Andre Carbonneau]

Thank you all for your time and answers!

About the complexity of the parameters in VRay, I find it cynical that a guy has released a plug-in to ease the tweaking of them! LOL! Some sort of presets. But it's only for MAX.
It's called SolidRocks. http://solidrocks.subburb.com/

The problem is exactly as some pointed before; the Vray business model is smooth talking the wallet of my bosses. ;)
Cheers,
Marc-Andre

Wehrgasse 9 - Gr�ner Hof

[Serguei Kalentchouk]

My two cents:
VRay was used very successfully for Tron and Real Steel. It was easy
to set up and manage the VRay pipeline. The turnaround time was really
fast and results were consistently good.
The support we got from the Chaos Group was good as well. And finally
the transition for most lighters and TDs from Renderman to VRay was
pretty smooth.

Arnold proved to be much more problematic from both pipeline and
artist adoption. It was difficult to get the results we were looking
for with displacement, which caused us to increase the resolution of
our models that was a hit across all departments.

--
Technical Director @ DreamWorks Animation

[Adam Sale]

The main thing I am looking for is the RT capability VRay currently has with Maya / Max. Love it. Without it, a lot of the quick iteration gets lost.. 

The last I heard from Chaos Group, this was a priority for V2. 

>          Wehrgasse 9 - Grüner Hof

>           1050 Vienna  Austria
>         Phone:    +43/699/12614231
> --- www.keyvis.at  ste...@keyvis.at ---
> --  This email and its attachments are
> --confidential and for the recipient only--
>
>

[Len Krenzler]

The absolute number 1 issue for me is no volume rendering.  That's a show stopper for me.  Hope to see this in the future.

Len - www.actionart.ca

[Vladimir Koylazov]

I'd like to comment on some of the items that invariably come up in any discussion of V-Ray for Softimage. Hopefully they will shed some light on the thinking behind the product. (Disclaimer: I don't mean to offend anyone :))

0. You must have interactive progressive re-rendering!

Yes, of course, and we are actively working on it.

1. There are a lot of options!

This is true and is due to the fact that V-Ray must work efficiently in many different scenarios. The approach for efficient rendering of an architectural interior is vastly different from that of rendering a few characters with IBL. If choosing the right GI engine reduces the render times by an order of magnitude, would you not want to have that option?

2. I must spend a lot of time tweaking all the options!

Only if you want to. Just because there are all these options, doesn't mean you have to go change every single one of them. Most settings have good defaults. Additionally, there are brute force settings that work almost always. They might not be the fastest ones, but they usually get the job done in reasonable time. So if you prefer to spend time rendering, rather than trying to speed up the render, this is entirely up to you. In any case, most people quickly find a set of settings that work well for their particular workflows and they soon learn what would be appropriate settings for a given scene. After that, the time spent on render set up is actually not that long.

3. You should just remove all the options so as not to scare new users, and instead give them an SDK to access extra features that they need! I can't imagine why anyone would need all that stuff anyways!

Most of the V-Ray users are not programmers; they don't have the ability, time or desire to deal with an SDK to get their job done. This is somewhat related to item #1 - if the users don't want (or don't know how) to deal with an SDK, we must still give them ways to do what they need. With that said, access to the V-Ray SDK in Maya and 3ds Max is quite advanced, and I hope we'll get to that point with V-Ray for Softimage as well.

4. You should just do what Arnold does, it's so much better!

Implementation differences aside, I really don't think an Arnold approach to V-Ray as a product would have been successful. Solid Angle has a good strategy for Arnold, but it won't work for us in the same way.

5. I don't know anything about V-Ray but I love Arnold!

<shrug> Arnold certainly is a very capable renderer. Nevertheless, I'm sure that many people will find V-Ray useful as well.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Steven Caron]

absolutely! there are downsides to both but both are very capable. i would prefer to use either over mental ray.

i have been using arnold and sitoa for a while now and really enjoy it, but i think vray provides a better balance for a smaller studio or one without a technical staff.

[Cristobal Infante]

I've been testing both for the last month, like everyone says VRay seems to have way more options

in the render settings and shaders but there is more info in the web. Arnold is easier to learn but it comes at a price,

something to consider as well..

One thing I love about Arnold though, is that fact they it calculates the GI of a certain frame and it allows to tweak

some shader values and render around the scene at a much faster render time. This makes the lighting process more intuitive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KemtQrh5UrE&feature=related

Vray is like MRay, from what I've gathered, you start from scratch everytime you tweak something (Please correct me if I am wrong)

It would be very helpful if Vray would come with a "material library presets", this would definitely help get nice results faster which is ultimately

what we all want :).