Vray for Maya?

[Karlfucious]

Is there any beta testers or anyone who can give me a heads up on when Vray for maya will be out. Im not looking for a release date but an approximation when they will be releasing it such as First, Secound quarter 06.

[Christopher Nichols]

These type of things are very hard to tell. I hate to say it, but release dates are pointless for things like this, and in some cases can be very bad... see what happened to Maxwell.

 

They DO have a Maya thing going on, it will soon be opened to a closed beta group soon, and may eventually open to a public beta. Currently, they are getting ready to finish up their 1.5 release. This may delay the progress a bit on the Maya integration.

[Karlfucious]

Thanks Christopher. And congrats on the Gnomon DVDs. Ill probably order them If I ever get ahold of vray for Maya. Not that Mental Ray really doesnt do what I need its just that I see all these great vray renders everywhere. I can get the same quality out of Mental Ray but it takes A LOT of tweaking and tweaking and tweaking. Also im not a big fan of Mental Rays photon mapping. I assume vray is a lot better in that aspect. I agree with you on the Maxwell thing. Maxwell for Maya turned out to be terrible.

[Christopher Nichols]

Well I know nothing about MAxwell itself, I was talking about the promisng release dates.

 

Now, from the very limited amount that I DO know, there will be little difference (in terms of workflow) from the Max version to the Maya version. So my DVD will still be helpful to you.

 

MR is a great option. It does photon mapping better then anyone. Vray's photon mapping is OK, but has a lot more power in doing Irradiance mapping and the lightcache method. It is also really good at all raytracing in general.

 

Chris

[Karlfucious]

Thanks for the comments Chris. I by no means think that Mental Ray's photon mapping is bad but it can definatly be a pain when you have a few lights in your scene. I personally like using Multibounce Final Gather better anyway. The only downside of using Multibounce FG is that If you have a lot of reflective objects (especially blured reflections) it can cause FG to calculate verry slow. In mental Ray you can Cache your Final Gather Map but it seems like doing it in vray is much better. Plus it has that Map viewer thing that seems pretty cool. Another gripe I have with mental ray is when you switch your standard lights over to area lights you rendertimes go up a lot. In some cases it can even triple your render times. Is this the same in Vray or are the area lights more effecient? Anyways sorry for all the questions. I guess Ill figure all this stuff out whenever I get ahold of vray lol.

 

Thanks,

Karl

[Christopher Nichols]

It is all a matter of settings. Vray is pretty darn fast, and based on the fact that it approaches problems differently, it can come of a solution faster (in many cases). But it is hard to say things like area lights are faster/slower, as this is very subjective to settings, quality, and other factors. I would say, I don't shy away from area lights to much in Vray.

 

But I would say, that to me, the way things are set up, it is more intuative to set up render in Vray then MentalRay. This is probably due to the fact that I have been using it since its creation. But other may agree with me as well.