common renderer for walkthroughs?

[Aaron2004]

Hey all!

 

I need to do some walkthroughs of residential buildings and have been told that VRAY works great for this because it saves the photon maps if nothing moves in the scene. This seems great to me, unfortunately I don't have the money. I am using VIZ 2005, so I have access to mental ray. What do you use for animated walkthroughs?

 

VRAY also turns me off because I need to use VRAY materials. If I want to export my scene somewhere, those materials won't come with it, correct?

 

Thanks!

 

Aaron

[C.Vestal]

You can convert your standard materials to v-ray rather easily. Once you get the settings down, you will be able to convert quickly. There are also lots of materials you can download or buy.

 

do some reasearch here:

http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum

 

I have not had to export a scene yet, so I do not know on that.

[Aaron2004]

Is Vray free 'good enough' for things like this? I haven't found a compare/contrast list about all of the releases. I'm having a hard time with Vray free...but what do you expect, I've only had it for about an hour. I'm just tinkering.

[Aaron2004]

Maybe I should clarify myself and simplify the question. The main thing that interstess me in VRAY is the ability to save your GI Map and create animations with it. Can Mental Ray do the same thing? Can I set it to calculate the lighting for the whole scene once every 30 frames or something to speed up my render time?

 

Thanks!

 

Aaron

[JamesTaylor]

i'm a Vray user, but you can generally do all the same things in MR - however Mental Ray is known as being less user friendly and more difficult to master, not to mention slower at calculating / rendering.

 

As with Vray, Mental ray has its own material type and lights - i think this will be the case with which ever renderer you use.