V-Ray newbie Questions

[steveblake]

Hello,

 

I'm a relatively new max user and I've never used anything other than mental ray as an 'external' renderer. I hear (and see) good things about V-Ray and wanted to ask a few questions:

 

1) What are the basic costs of setting up V-Ray on a renderfarm? Is it a per node licensing or do you pay only once for a single license on a renderfarm?

 

2) In production, what are regarded as V-Ray's most attractive features?

 

3) Given a good set of uv's can V-Ray render's be baked at all?

 

4) Is it considered a speedy solution (ie in relation to other GI type renderers) - have people posted favorable comparative tests for example?

 

5) Concerning workflows - is it really suitable for rendering animations? or would it be preferable to bake textures, render and composite in animated objects, people etc?

 

6) How does V-Ray compare to Mental Ray & Maxwell in terms of speed efficiency?

 

hope people don't mind me posting this here...

 

many thanks!

[JamesTaylor]

1. you pay for one license, it can installed / used unlimited on render nodes

 

2. Speed / quality - it does all things that all the others do but faster.....doesn't have maxwells sun system set up but the runours suggest it will have its own similar system inplemented for the next release. Overall very easy to set up, can be used on default settings and achieve good results straight out the box

 

3. not sure about this, never done it.....i beleive it can be done well but i've seen a few posts with people struggling to achieve it.....don't know enough about it to comment properly

 

4. regarded as fastest going for its quality......has pretty much become industry standard......

 

5. suitable for rendering animation where everything is still except the camera pre calculating irridance maps and lightcache etc.save much time.......GI always has issues when rendering animations of moving objects as the lighting levels have to be recalced for each frame......baking and comping may well work...

 

6. Different league....especially against maxwell which generally is too slow to be considered for using in majority of situations....much, much easier to use than both also so setup time is greatly reduced aswell

[steveblake]

That's great jat - certainly sounds attractive. Especially as you don't have to buy a license for each render machine.

 

I'd be interested to hear if you're tried finalRender or Brazil at all - would you consider V-ray superior for by comparison? (Especially for architectural type visualization)

[JamesTaylor]

definately an attractive option but i have to say that i haven't tried finalrender so couldn't really compare......there are probably one or two others that may be worth considering too....one being brazil (can't think of any more at the min actually!!)

 

However, the ones already mentioned are the better known ones.......of which vray has to be the most used and as such has lots of help and reference sources on the web which is also worth considering in decision