V-ray

[carlangas]

Hi,

 

Can any one tell me what the main defferences between v-ray free, the basic and advanced versions are? their website leads you to the wrong page for this specific info.

 

Is the free version better than 3ds´s scanline renderer?

 

Thanks

[Arkitec]

absolutely its better....from what i remember ( i have the advanced version) when I originally downloaded it, it doesnt have a Vray specific light source. It doesnt have the material wrapper or vray material. You have to set your light sources to Vray shadows....

 

Its still a great renderer and its free!!!!!!

 

Arkitec

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

vray free also does not allow you to save and reuse irradiance maps.

[Jim Mann]

I e-mailed Vray a few times with the exact same question because of the exact same problem and eventually received the following response:

 

Features of the Basic package:

· True raytraced reflections and refractions

· Glossy reflections and refractions

· Translucency (with volume fog) for creating wax, marble, smoked glass

· Area shadows (soft shadows). Includes box and sphere emitters.

· Indirect Illumination (global illumination, global lighting). Different

approaches include direct computation (brute force), and irradiance maps.

· Motion Blur. Includes stochastic sampling approach

· Depth-Of-Field camera effect.

· Anti-aliasing. Includes fixed, simple 2 level and adaptive approaches.

· Caustics (Radiosity)

· G-Buffer (RGBA, material/object ID, Z-buffer)

 

VRay Advanced package:

Includes all basic features plus:

· G-buffer based antialiasing.

· Reusable irradiance maps (save and load support). Incremental sampling

for fly-through animations.

· Motion blur with analytic sampling

· True HDRI support. Includes *.hdr, *.rad image loader with proper texture

coordinates handling for both cubic and angular maps support. Map your images

directly without distortions or cropping.

· Built-in area lights for physically correct illumination

· Built-in material for faster materials calculations

· Distributed rendering for utilizing all of your studios computers.

· Different camera types: fish-eye, spherical, cylindrical and cubic cameras

· Internal analytical displacement maps.

· Global photon maps

· Instanced geometry rendering

· Displacement maps based on Chaos Group's personal technology that does not

create additional geometry, thus reducing memory usage.

· Internal Virtual Frame buffer with internal color correction controls

 

Hope this helps.

 

Jim

[Christopher Nichols]

Personally I think that Basic is really not worth it. Vray Free is amazing, mainly because it is free. But if you get basic you will quickly want to have some of the features in advanced. They geared basic towards people that don't do animation. And if you do ANY time of animation, especially architectural animation, you will want advanced mainly because of the irradiance map features that are added. Plus you get better HDR, better lighting, better (and faster) vraymatterial, lightmapping, etc...

 

I would suggest using Vray free as long as you can, and as long as you get really good at it, then "upgrade" to advanced.