comparing vray & mental ray

[weetie]

I've been working with mental ray but I'm thinking about switching to vray for an upcoming project. Can anybody share their impressions of how RECENT versions of these two compare? I can find a lot of discussions dating from 5 or 6 years ago, but these are probably no longer relevant. I downloaded the vray demo, but I'm having license problems, & can't try it out at the moment.

I'd be especially interested to know how quick & easy vray is to learn, compared to mental ray, as I'll be short on time to learn it.

Thanks!

[Dave Buckley]

placed in the right hands both are capable of equal results

 

attached are two renders - one originated i mental ray, the other vray, i've not chosen these for any particular reason, just the first good MR and VRAY images i came across in my reference folder.

 

it just proves my first sentence and it's not just about the render engine, it's also what you do to the image afterwards too that can make all the difference

 

with regards to learning time, i've spent ages learning MR but i did decide to learn VRAY and my knowledge of MR transferred really easily. However, for what it's worth, i'm still using MR - at the end of the day, MR = £0 whereas VRAY = £350+

[Dave Buckley]

and also credits go to both people who created these images - hope you don't mind me using them as examples

[kareemkarawia]

if you are mental ray user it's easy anytime to learn any other 3rd party rendering engine.

But i have an issue with vray in animation .... it will take a very long time in rendering because you will have to increase the quality of the rendering to get a smooth motion without flickering ... on the other hand mental ray has stable quality with animation rendering ... in other words ... if you are rendering animation frames in mental ray with low quality you will have all frames in the SAME LOW quality so the animation will be smooth .... but Vray you will have life time rendering to have a smooth animation

 

For still frames Vray is the master ... Better quality in less time

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I am experienced in both and I have felt what has been touched on by others. In Mental Ray it is easier to produce better materials, in Vray it is easier to produce better light solutions.

 

For example, Materials.... MR default A&D settings for materials are already adding reflections and IOR. MR is already sending you down the path for a more robust material. Vray gives you a matte gray.

 

Lighting.... Vray out of the box gives you solutions that trace the light from the camera point of view. MR can do this also, but you need special shaders for it.

 

Vray tends to be faster at rendering out the images, which is huge for me.

 

You can produce nice images with both engines, but each engine does have its own strength. In my opinion quality of light is more important than materials in architectural delineation. This is also why I believe that Vray has been favored over MR for the last handful of years.

 

For myself, Vray has proven to be faster and more reliable at rendering images, especially if you have a lot of geometry, or a lot of proxies.

 

In general I would say that Mental Ray is more of a platform for rendering, while Vray is more of a turn key solution.

 

By this I mean that in my opinion you can do a more with Mental Ray than you can with Vray. But to get to the stage where you can do more you have to understand shaders and how they work, and preferably be able to write a few of your own. The shaders and solutions out of the box will work, but if you want its true power, you need to be technically intelligent.

Edited July 7, 2010 by Crazy Homeless Guy

[Bruce Hart]

I agree with CHG. I changed to Vray from MR mid last year. I've spent a lot of time analysing Vray renders by people the world over in comparison to MR images (plus doing my own image side by side comparisons), and it's the VR lighting quality that does it for me. As mentioned above - IMO it contributes more to the success of the overall image than the materials. In a day to day working envoronment with quick turn around jobs, I've appreciated the speed and reliability of Vray since making the switch, and at the moment I see no reason to return to MR.

[Spacelord]

Lighting.... Vray out of the box gives you solutions that trace the light from the camera point of view. MR can so this, but you need special shaders for it. Vray tends to be faster at rendering out the images, and for me, better for animation use.

 

 

Hi Travis,

I thought this is how Final Gather works, it shoots rays from the camera where as photons are from light sources.

I don't think there is much difference between Mental Ray and Vrays final gather.

Maybe they produce a different out put but its based of the same technology papers.

 

I use mental ray, but the thing I like about Vray is its updates aren't relient on Autodesk to release another version 3dsmax.

If theres a bug in Mental Ray you pretty much have to wait for the next release or hope theres a hotfix.

[weetie]

.... it will take a very long time in rendering because you will have to increase the quality of the rendering to get a smooth motion without flickering ... on the other hand mental ray has stable quality with animation rendering ...

 

That's useful to know. I'm looking at doing a 5-minute animation with several different scenes. So although a lot of the people replying here say Vray gives better lighting quality out of the box, maybe I should stay with MR for this job.

 

Thanks!

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Hi Travis,

I thought this is how Final Gather works, it shoots rays from the camera where as photons are from light sources.

I don't think there is much difference between Mental Ray and Vrays final gather.

Maybe they produce a different out put but its based of the same technology papers.

 

I use mental ray, but the thing I like about Vray is its updates aren't relient on Autodesk to release another version 3dsmax.

If theres a bug in Mental Ray you pretty much have to wait for the next release or hope theres a hotfix.

 

Hmmm. Not sure about FG shooting from the camera. I guess it makes sense since it is view dependent, but I don't know the specifics of the technology for FG.

 

The best quality I have been able to get with MR in terms of the detail and subtlety with the light and shadow is by using Irradiance Particle and Importons. They are not fully supported, they have not been optimized for speed, and they require 3rd party shaders.... but they give beautiful light if you are patient.

 

I agree with you about the implentation and updating of MR in Max. I still don't know if BSP2 and Distributed rendering actually work together, not to mention very few of Max2009 scenes would render in 2010. I never felt like their was a clear path towards problem solving bugs in Mental Ray. Are the bugs Mental Images problem or Autodesks problem? With Vray you get direct responses from Vlado, and intermittent updates that fix items in the render engine.

 

I know Autodesk has been a lot more active in interacting with the user base, but when it comes towards bugs in Mental Ray I was never felt satisifed with the solutions. I felt all to often the answer presented was that the problem was user error. Maybe I just interpreted the way things were handled incorrectly, and became frustrated to quickly.

 

The not being able to use BSP2 and DBR was a big problem for me, and it didn't get addressed in subsequent releases so my confidence level on items like that being fixed as things move forward became less and less.

 

Another thing that became a problem with me in MR was the MR Sun and Sky system combined with the physical camera. The color casts never felt right, and always leaned to much towards blue/green. This caused the images to feel a bit cold and stand-offish to me. I would spend a lot of time in post trying to warm the tones back up. It was not until after I moved back to Vray that I saw some of Matt Clinch's HDRI and MR work that I realized the best workflow in MR would be not to use the physical sun and sky system, but to stick to HDRI lighting.

Edited July 7, 2010 by Crazy Homeless Guy

[Spacelord]

BSP2 works fine with DBR now, so loads of proxies, high resolution, displacement all seems to work fine now.

Though there was a bug with animation BSP2 and final Gather, some memory leak, but I think the latest hotfix fixed it.

 

I use Physical sun in most of my renderings. I do remember getting the subtley green hue going on, I don't seem to get it anymore unless I'm working around it.

 

 

Yes Importons and IP are great and now that you can use it with FG is even faster and progressive AA on top of that, you have some pretty fast renderings for internals, glossie mats, DOF, area lights.

 

I will have to buy Vray one day, VrayRT looks great and demo of VrayRT on GPU is even sweeter.

It does seem to be the way most renderers are going.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I use Physical sun in most of my renderings. I do remember getting the subtley green hue going on, I don't seem to get it anymore unless I'm working around it.

 

 

What white point are you using? I just checked the default settings with the sun and sky system and the camera white point set to 6500. Green was still the dominant color for me.

 

I tend to like red to be more dominant than the blue or green. The same reason that people look better under incandescent light than they do under fluorescent light.

Edited July 8, 2010 by Crazy Homeless Guy

[odouble]

Just thinking about how colors work, the dominant color should be green where the blue skylight mixes with the warm (yellow/amber) sunlight.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Just thinking about how colors work, the dominant color should be green where the blue skylight mixes with the warm (yellow/amber) sunlight.

 

That sounds logical, but I am not convinced that this is how light works in the real world. In general, green light makes things look cold and ugly, warm light makes thing look appealing. I need the warm light.

 

I have had projects turned away before simply because they have a green cast.

[Spacelord]

That definitely looks green, I have never really noticed it unless I was doing something that was nearly all white.

You could drive the red/blue tint in the non-physically tuning panel, push it into the red a little should replace it.

 

cheers

[odouble]

That sounds logical, but I am not convinced that this is how light works in the real world. In general, green light makes things look cold and ugly, warm light makes thing look appealing. I need the warm light.

 

I have had projects turned away before simply because they have a green cast.

 

Yes yes...The real world is not rasterized into some rgb gamut like it is in Mentalray. Blue and yellow will always be some kind of green after rasterization.

For a more physically accurate look, you should use the Perez sky model instead of the default haze sky.

[mattclinch]

white balance for the exterior daylight to avoid the green cast. typical clear blue sky should be 7000-7400K, this will warm the sunlit areas.

[Jesper Pedersen]

We have been using both MentalRay and vRay for years before we switched to Maxwell recently. We will occasionally still use Mental Ray for a project but increasingly we are only using Maxwell, despite long render times we find we are able to get much better results and excellent control over both lighting and materials.

[Tommy L]

I think Maxwell shot its own feet off some time ago.

[Thablanch]

I think Maxwell shot its own feet off some time ago.

 

?.. still getting more users, even if the number of unbiased renderers are poping up like one new one each week...

[Jesper Pedersen]

I think Maxwell shot its own feet off some time ago.

 

Thomas,

Your post is a little vague! What are you basing this on? Have you actually worked with Maxwell? We have been using it for nearly 6 months now, and we have not looked back (at 8 years of using Mental Ray & vRay) I would nearly describe the improvement as similar to when we swithed from the 3ds max scanline renderer to Mental Ray ! We are even using it for animations.

Jesper