MentalRay and/or versus Vray..???

[Renderbarn]

Hi Guys

I have been working long years with the scanline renderer of Studiomax. Now I am checking out MentalRay really forward and backward and...have 1 problem. The rendering times.....are awful (sometimes), even previews in the exposure control can take quite long. No questions, my results with it are looking quite good after some patience but....Vray advertises, that it is a fast rendering solution. Fast in my terms would mean something like 2 hours for medium quality images, more sophisticated would mean overnight render. I guess the majority here is using Vray, as it seems. Can you tell me if this true or what was your experience comparing those 2 rendering solutions regarding work-flow and rendering time.

Thanks...

[aaron-cds]

From what I hear, Vray is still faster than MR. However, it's not free like MR is. Render times depend on the scene and your processing power.

[gato_maxx]

With Vray, you could get good quality images in only 15 mins, at most... so...

 

Switch inmediately...!!

[Sawyer]

Yeah you need to commit to learning the tools. Thats it. They will both do great things but you need to learn them otherwise they won't solve any problems. Look into which one you think you could learn better. Which one has better support/community. Because for both of them if you are not sure of what you are doing all you have done is bought a headache.

[Justin Hunt]

Agree, both are said to be fast, how fast it all depends on the settings.

 

JHV

[Renderbarn]

Yeah well right so far...

I have created a scene with typical uses of these renderers with polished surfaces, glass, water and so on and I will put it through both. I am almost finished in having the result I want in Mental Ray and I will do exactly the same scene in Vray. That should give me a good idea of comparison. I just hoped, that somebody has done something like that before and would be happy to share these results......

[Justin Hunt]

Something similar,

 

Things I noted

 

Vray

Relativly quick to get base lighting solution, but painful to tweek to get an acceptable solution

Lots of help and tutorials, although most say the same thing twenty different ways.

If you rely on opacity maps, it will kill rendertimes

Glossies are slow

DR is easy to set up

Difficult to get high res renders, little tools to manage memory

 

Mentalray

Presets work well for Final Gather, but Phonons take too long to get the right settings. Once these are correct you will get very fast rendering

Not enough tutorials, although they are getting better

The A&D shader Poops all over the Vray material

Glassies are fast and optimisable

Cutout maps work really well

DR is too compicated/flakey to setup

Memory issues for high res renders, alot of tools to manage memory, although they are complicated.

No Proxies

 

Conclusion

The two are very similar in that methodologis are very similar

The learning curve is steep for both, although Mental is slightly easier.

Mental is slightly more robust than Vray

Mental gives you the option to render without GI, ie old school lighting

 

(There are alot more points, but it is pointless to list them all;) )

 

JHV

[Renderbarn]

Ahhh here we go, it is getting interesting. For plants for example I need to rely on opacity maps. I will check it in Vray....I got now my time down in Mental for my sample scene to 1-2 hours rendering, that's getting good.

I saw already, that you can mix conventional light and mentalray lights, same goes for the materials, which is good. I probably post the samples once they are finished..

I also noticed that in comparison to Vray, there is little information on mentalray available (tutorials), though some are really good.( I mean "free information" for the guys doing the video workshop)

[Justin Hunt]

Just on the opacity map side of comarison.

 

Its a well known fact that Vray doesnt like OP maps. Mentalray A&D shader uses Cutout, which is OP in steroids.

 

I did a scene in Vray that used around 500 OP maped bushes overlapping and stacked over each other. Vray 7 hours to renders Mental 1 hour (relative lighting and rendering settings in both).

 

On shader type, both Vray and Mental take standard shaders and lights, but Mental plays better with them. Obvoiusly both prefer to use their native shaders best. Mental has more shader types to play with, which is both a good thing and its biggest critizism, too danting.

 

Take a look at http://www.mymentalray.com for fantastic tutrials and forum for all versions of Mental. Also Jeff Patterns blog and Master Zaps blog

 

JHV

[manta]

Just on the opacity map side of comarison.

 

Its a well known fact that Vray doesnt like OP maps. Mentalray A&D shader uses Cutout, which is OP in steroids.

 

I did a scene in Vray that used around 500 OP maped bushes overlapping and stacked over each other. Vray 7 hours to renders Mental 1 hour (relative lighting and rendering settings in both).

 

On shader type, both Vray and Mental take standard shaders and lights, but Mental plays better with them. Obvoiusly both prefer to use their native shaders best. Mental has more shader types to play with, which is both a good thing and its biggest critizism, too danting.

 

Take a look at http://www.mymentalray.com for fantastic tutrials and forum for all versions of Mental. Also Jeff Patterns blog and Master Zaps blog

 

JHV

 

Hey Justin,

Trying to recreate your 7 hour problem in vray...but not having much luck, I created a scene with 1200 opacity mapped planes...created a vray material with the diffuse map, and the alpha in the opacity slot, used a vray sun and vray camera...added GI with lightcache (default settings) and Irra. mapping for primary (at low settings) and rendered at 3000 x 800...rendering took 15 min.

 

can you elaborate on your settings...

 

Thanx, Bill

[Justin Hunt]

It was a while ago, admittedly on a crappy machine. The OP maps ended up being one of the major problems, the other was glossies. I did note that the biggest slow down in rendering was through the OP mapped areas. In the same areas with Mental, there was no slow down at all.

 

Part of the slow down I think was the texture sampling, once set to none there was a significan speed up.

 

JHV

[Zdravko Barisic]

Hi Guys

I have been working long years with the scanline renderer of Studiomax. Now I am checking out MentalRay really forward and backward and...have 1 problem. The rendering times.....are awful (sometimes), even previews in the exposure control can take quite long. No questions, my results with it are looking quite good after some patience but....Vray advertises, that it is a fast rendering solution. Fast in my terms would mean something like 2 hours for medium quality images, more sophisticated would mean overnight render. I guess the majority here is using Vray, as it seems. Can you tell me if this true or what was your experience comparing those 2 rendering solutions regarding work-flow and rendering time.

Thanks...

 

 

As you just begining with learning VR/MR my advice is to go with MR (!!), even I am on Vray drug for 2/3 years.

Why?

Well, from my angle of view, future belongs to MR.

In the past MR was very hard to learn and took a lot of time to render. Nowadays, the thing are changed, MR is closer to one-click render, it has the most powerfull integration with 3dsMAX and it continue to grow very fast (

A lot of people switched to VR from scanline or LS, in that times MR was terrible slow. Today, every new version of MAX brings a lot of upgrades to MR also.

If you look at MAX 2008 videos you will notice, that nowMR support "famous rectangle fill light" for interior/windows.

Daylight system has better integration with max.

If you look at VR, you will find out that a whole past year was "RC year". And almost every plugin for max support MR also, which is not the case with VR.

If I should start now it would be definitly MR.

From the other side, VR has a much better background support, as a tons of video/html tutorials over the net, 1000s of shaders free for download, prepared models of furniture etc....

If you want top of the tops and complete 100% control of your scene/render you definitly need MR.

But if you can work in "this does not work with VR" way, relax, and go with VR.

I am shore I did not help you a lot, but just one opinion more

[wantonwanton]

Hi ,

 

I am in the same boat as Natahlie. Trying to decide which is better. Will be deciding next week based on some testing and post here.

 

Natahlie, iI see u r a fellow NZer. Cool to see another girl on the 3D team....

 

Ciao