Working in parallel with Vray and Maxwell/Fry?

[klonk]

Hi all,

 

I'm a long time on and off user of Max with Vray, it's not my main field as I'm more of a design/builder, but I enjoy it. Lately though I've been considering purchasing a license of either Maxwell or Fryrender to see if that can take me in another direction.

 

However, I'd need to use them in parallel as I know what I can and can't do with Vray. Is there a way to have parallel setups of materials and lights or is this not a reasonable way of working? I don't think I'll ever leave Vray as it gives me very fast results.

 

Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this.

 

Best,

Nick

[Tommy L]

If you want render-speed in a GI engine, vray is hard to beat, although Mental Ray is pretty similar.

Maxwell and FryRender are 'unbiased'. This is means (in a nutshell) that they use raw mathematics to compute a real physics based lighting solution. This means that the render time (usually) is longer than an 'biased' render, which uses user data to generate globally illuminated scenes.

However, it can also be argued that because the lighting (once you know the software inside out) and materials are 'real' then the setup time for the scenes is much shorter than messing around with settings etc in vray. So the time factor is as it always has been. In the hands of the user......

What is beyond question is that amazing results are possible with MR, Vray, Fry and MW. Try the trials and choose your weapons.

[klonk]

Thanks for your response, Tommy..

 

This isn't really my issue though, I think I have a pretty good grip on the differences between the engines.

 

Imagine you're working on a developing project scene in Vray, and wants to render it in Maxwell/Fry occasionally to get a higher quality render. The project has continuous changes and tweaks and lasts for months (as when you design a custom home). You primarily work in Vray for speed but would once a week like to render it out in Maxwell/Fry.

 

Anyone has a suggested workflow that works for this?

Edited September 25, 2008 by klonk

[Tommy L]

Klonk,

I havnt tried going from one render engine to another mid-project, but if this project is ongoing, I wouldnt recommend it. I think you should just find the optimum render settings for 'WIP and 'FINAL' on each project and save them as a preset. Then you can just load a preset and hit render when you are at each stage.

It sounds like you are trying to shoe-horn another app in to ease your workflow. I think this is just going to complicate things.

High end renderings are perfectly do-able in Vray. Id master one animal before trying to make it play with others.

 

I know this doesnt answer your question of "are they inter-operable". However, they work in intrinsically different ways, so I think you would need to do some scripting to get them to play ball in an efficient manner.

 

Hopefully someone who knows more about this jumps in and answers your question directly.

[F J]

hi,

i've done this before..

the only thing parallel about it was saving out the same .max file in order to make a copy of it, just so i could have another Material Editor to add Fry materials manually (keeping the previous ME intact), as there is no Auto-Converter for FRY, AFAIK (as there is from Standard Max to VRay)..

not really that much of a burden tho.. just another step in the workflow..

[Fran]

There is an autoconverter for standard max materials to fryrender approximations, but not from Vray ones. You can either autoconvert the max materials to fryrender ones, or have fryrender do in on the fly at export time. There are two weaknesses in this approach - 1) fryrender materials are best when user-created or tweaked, and 2) vray scenes should use vray materials for the best results.

[klonk]

Thanks all for your replies, most helpful.

 

I guess thinking about it there doesn't seem to be a realistic way to work on a scene with two renderers in mind at the same time. Still, I'm a bit surprised that people seem to hone in on one renderer and then stay with that one, given that they have different strengths.