Renderers...

[portisgreg]

I've recently got into the world of renderers and I was wondering what everyone's preferences were? And what the advantages & disadvantages of each are?

 

Cheers

 

Greg

[STRAT]

depends what software you use and what you're happy with. there's too many renderers and pros and cons to compair all in this post, but generally speaking, vray is the industry standard which most peeps are happy with.

[portisgreg]

Sorry! Should have said shouldn't i... DUH!

 

3dsmax 8 (soon to be 9)

 

Obviously it comes with MR which is cool but I was wondering why Vray was the industry standard? Faster? better detail in certain situations?

[Thablanch]

Mental Ray now have some presets, but before, to have a decent result (for ArchViz), you needed a lot of tweaking.

 

Speedwise, Vray is fast and versatile, Lots of controll, what method of GI do you want, Vray Got It,

 

Maxwell: most of the result are really nice

+ people like it because it is simple setup, materials are presets, unbiased

- Render times, it is not a concern for some people...But

 

Fryrender:

Same direction as Maxwell, unbiased, really good results.

 

You can always give a try at Indigo renderer: Unbiased, simple setup, Free. You'll see if you like the method, and can after switch to one of the other ones

 

Brazil: way less popular theses days, but a good solid renderer. The shaders were simple and ahead of there time.. a few years ago. More of a brute force renderer..

 

FinalRender: They just updated, it seems to be great now. They got Irradiance maps, physical cameras, all the nifty stuff that you can find in other packages. Did not put my hands on this one for years..

FinalToon was quite fast and usefull, must I say.

 

MentalRay. Now free with Max/Viz. Solid, has prove itself. Interface was quite complex to get really average results, but now, it kinda nice... Worth giving it a try, it is already on your machine.

 

Vray: Got Many methods, QMC, unbiased, averaging algorythms..

Speed is...wow, previews, of what your scene is going to be, in a few seconds. Material setup quite easy. Good Solid Distributed Rendering (1image on 10 machines), For Free ( wich most of the others you have to buy extra licences) Works in a seemless way with Max/viz, including Backburner..

 

Actually, to take a Vray user away from his production engine, you better have some really good reasons.

 

You can always download the free/demo version from chaosgroup website, and make an idea for yourself

[portisgreg]

Thanks Alain!

 

Thats really helpful. It looks like Vray is the preference there. I don't know if i can persuade the company to shell out for it at the mo though so I might have to use MR for a while.

 

"Good Solid Distributed Rendering (1image on 10 machines)" - so you mean i can break up a single frame render over 10 machines? This would save me forever! Does this work in mental ray?

 

Greg

[Thablanch]

Yep, split your single image on 10 computers, quite cool..

 

There is some DR in Mental Ray.

Note that if you are using Viz2008, permissions have been for network/distributed rendering

Max Licensing should not be a problem..

[AJLynn]

Could you clarify the part about permissions for distributed rendering in Viz2008? I'm going to have to start using it pretty soon, coming from Max. What is it - 3 mental ray distributed nodes plus the workstation running any given render job?

[Sawyer]

I think one of the main reasons vray is so dominant is that they had the most liberal licensing set up for distributed renderings. Mental Ray had a much more expensive licensing set up when it first cam out in max. After a while autodesk changed the policy which I believe is now pretty similar to vray's. I really think MR is worth looking at if for no other reason it is free. And the flexibility you get with the materials is just amazing.

[portisgreg]

Thats fantastic.

 

I always knew I could send whole frames of an animation over to other machines to net render but never parts of a single frame!

 

I don't suppose you know of any good tutorials on how to set this up in MR? I'll check out google.

 

THANKS!

[AJLynn]

Agreed - after doing a few projects with mental ray (in Max9) I'm as comfortable using it as I am with Vray and getting just as good results, even though there are a few Vray features I miss. Most of my materials are Arch&Design now (and what's not to love about Arch&Design materials) and I'm only falling back on the mental ray material when I need some effect, like glowing stuff that's simple to set up that way.

[aaron-cds]

MR 3.5 is great for most situations now that they've made it easier to use. I might be using MR if I hadn't already purchased Vray when MR was a pain to use for interiors.

 

One of the great things about Vray is the vrayproxy feature. I recently had a project where I had nearly 300 chaise lounge chairs for a large pool project. Even with all of the proxies I still had nearly 2 million poly's. I can't imagine how large the file would have been otherwise. If you're using a lot of 3d plants, vrayproxy is a life saver as well.