Vray or Brazil?

[Dan Larsson]

Hi All,

I am trying to make a purchasing decision on a GI renderer for 3DSMAX between Brazil and VRAY (or any other favorite you may want to suggest). Which is better for Arch-Vis in general? Here are my criteria in order of importance:

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1) Needs to be able to handle large amounts of geometry relatively easily and with STABILITY. Tried and Proven in an arch-vis production environment.

2) Produces pretty results WITHOUT light/material fakery. That is to say (for example), I don't want to have to add lights because it's too dark with the lights that were specified by the design drawings (unless of course the design is the problem).

I want a fully physically based solution. It's nice if materials can be specified by reflectivity instead of by desired rendered output color(that is, a typical painted white wall is defined as (in decimal fractions of 0-255 range) RGB 0.75 0.75 0.75, not RGB 1.0 1.0 1.0).

3) Handles natural day/sky lighting (light emmitted from windows into interior) well with out the need for fakery. Handles sky light for exterior renderings well.

(By "well" i mean looks-real and renders-relatively-quickly-and-stably and doesn't produce artifacting).

4) Not too picky about how geometry is created. doesn't care if edges don't meet or surface intersect etc the way radiosity meshing does. (but this is the lowest priority - i can deal with special modeling provisions almost as fast as sloppy ones) but if geometry creation introduces stability issues, that is a concern.

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I am aware that brazil has a more expensive liscence agreement for network rendering, but this is irrelevant to my decision because i will be on a stand alone machine.

Also, I am not hugely swayed by render times as being a factor. i will primarily be doing still renderings for print purposes and as long as i can render a few images over night at 3000x2250 resolution or so.. that would be great.

As a background note, i am comming from a lightscape background and i like lightscape a lot but geomety creation and modifcation is tedious and too time consuming and the results are not quite as realistic/pretty as what i've seen with vray and the like. Finally the render times are UNBEARABLY long (40 hours for an exterior with sky lighting only is too long).

I am leaning towards Vray because Their gallery looks like it has more arch-vis stuff on it and looks to be of a higher quality than Brazil's, but maybe I am overlooking something. Is there any reason NOT to go with Vray based on my criteria?

Thanks,

Dan

[DennisHolland]

Looking at your needs, you should go for v-ray renderer. Comparision between Brazil and v-ray would be that quality is great when working with v-ray and Brazil, but v-ray can handle the hires (over 3000 px) easely over night and if you're skilled in optimizing rendersettings you can render a still in a couple of hours, if not in one hour or less.

 

I particularly like Brazil a lot. Especially for the outside renderings, it's only a matter of choice. Brazil is very slow when your rendering interiors with full GI and lots of heavy materials, even if you're using the photonmapping techniques. Outside shots are the best quality (my opinion) and way nicer than v-ray, outside rendering in Brazil can be done overnight at serious res.

 

V-ray is easy to finetune and damn fast with GI and all turned on because of the irradiancemap you can pre-calculate on a low resolution and less AA sampling.

 

And...there's Maxwell, since you're asking for a 'not so faky 'engine. well, let's wait a while with that. Go for v-ray and you are in business before you know it, a softer learningcurve than Brazil and all support you need is found on this forum and some other famous ones around. :-)

 

Take care, enjoy.

Dennis

[chuck]

I second Vray. I'm still using the free version here and there, and it's really fast. I've used Brazil for a few projects, but it's slower and takes longer to set up (see above).

 

Maxwell? I'm hoping the "final" will be out by summer. It has some great features, but it's still slow and it's been a constant source of dissapointment because of delays...

 

Chuck

[manta]

Vray for sure, I liked using Brazil but Vray has many things Brazil doesn't, vray proxy meshes, come in very handy for large amounts of foliage, vrayfur which can be used for grass, or use vray displacement to do grass also, being able to save your irradiance maps and re-use them is very handy, also their licencing is much better, unlimited network rendering, and distributed rendering on ten computers, and costs 30% less than brazil...

 

I think that once Maxwell is done it will be great, and probably more of what you're looking for, but its going to be a long while before that happens...

[AJLynn]

Also, don't rule out network rendering. Consider: You can get a dual 2-2.4GHz Dell used for $400-500, usually including a Windows license, and with your Vray and Max licenses there's no more software to pay for to make that a render node. "A few" shots at 3000x res overnight might be a lot to ask for from one box, depending on what you're doing exactly.

[quizzy]

First of all I'm a big Brazil fan/user. But when it comes down to licensing V-ray has the advantage for sure. When it comes down to quality brazil is my favorite.

 

I would wait for maybe a month or two with your purchase since (I think) V-ray is coming out with a new version but Brazil2 is also near finished. Brazil2 will be about 10 times faster as it is now (in some cases even way more than that) Doing an interior without any artifacts in 15 minutes on screen res on a decent comp. are thing you can expect from Brazil 2.

 

In short: I would wait... (if you can)

[manta]

First of all I'm a big Brazil fan/user. But when it comes down to licensing V-ray has the advantage for sure. When it comes down to quality brazil is my favorite.

I would wait for maybe a month or two with your purchase since (I think) V-ray is coming out with a new version but Brazil2 is also near finished. Brazil2 will be about 10 times faster as it is now (in some cases even way more than that) Doing an interior without any artifacts in 15 minutes on screen res on a decent comp. are thing you can expect from Brazil 2.

In short: I would wait... (if you can)

 

Could you tell us how its going to be ten times faster, haven't read anything about Brazil in a long while...

[Maximus3D]

Eheh.. i just gotta say that when reading this thread it made me laugh. asking a question like this in a part of this forum dedicated to only Vray is gonna give you very one-sided replies which it also did. I wouldn't base my purchase decisions on this only. That's like you go into a Ferrari car dealer and ask them to try to convince you to buy a Trabant instead of the Ferrari, it's not gonna happen.

 

Sorry about this but i had to say this as it was just a very once-sided point of view on this subject. No offense to anyone.

 

/ Max

[Craig Ramsay]

Good point Maximus... i've moved this post to the 3rd party renderers part of the site