Vray 2 vs Mental Ray 2011

[TJunkers]

I know... There have been a million discussions about these in the past, but the reason I am making a new post is because every thread I see deals with old versions of both mental ray or V-Ray. Can anyone give me their opinion or point me in the direction of someone comparing mental rays latest versions vs V-Rays latest or upcoming 2.0?

 

Thanks! I do a lot of architecture visualization and have been using mental ray for over a year now, but all the addons and plugins to V-Ray that I see are just incredible that I start to question if I should make the switch!

 

Side question - Is it true that V-Ray tends to render faster? Thanks!

[ihabkal]

Hi Tyson,

I tried to convince many to leave mental ray and join the Vray group, I am not going to go into details and I don't know the vray 2 new features, all I can say is Vray is the best for me. I love it.

[TJunkers]

Hi Tyson,

I tried to convince many to leave mental ray and join the Vray group, I am not going to go into details and I don't know the vray 2 new features, all I can say is Vray is the best for me. I love it.

 

Do you find it faster than Mental Ray when rendering?

[ihabkal]

Hi there,

that's a proven fact that Vray renders faster than mental ray.

Thanks

[AJLynn]

I hate these blanket generalizations. Faster? Depends on which one you're better at optimizing.

[Nic H]

i prefer vray.

quick development, wide user base, not an autodesk product (auotdesk just play desperate catchups to vray) fantastic development team, great support, loads of people use it etc.

 

they are both the same really, depends which you are more skilled at - stay with what you are best at i reckon.

[John Dollus]

well, it's best to compare shipping versions side by side in any case and just to be clear, mental ray is not an autodesk product but it is free for max users just like the city engine lite included w/2011. What sort of add ons and plugins do you see for Vray that you don't feel are available to you as a mental ray user?

as far as the speed, it really depends more on the user and pipeline than anything else unless your job is really just re-rendering lots of optimized demo scenes

[gato_maxx]

Well, Blur used Mental Ray for all its cinematics, until they decided to give Vray a try. And guess what happened? Of course, they loved it!

 

Here´s the complete story, and they give very precise technical reasons why Vray is better for them than Mental:

 

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5921&page=1

Edited October 19, 2010 by gato_maxx

[carlotristan3d]

I'm a recent convert to Vray and I love it. The lighting is vastly superior and once I understood the settings, I was able to cut down my rendering time. What I loved about MR is the A&D shader plus it has simpler parameters. But later versions of Vray are able to read A&D shader so this negates one of MR's advantages IMO. But that being said, I can live with any of these engines as long as I have Photoshop!

[Justin Hunt]

It may read the A&D shader, but it doesn't support all the really cool features of the A&D shader, it converts it to a vray material behind the scenes.

 

I have been using both in production for a few months now, there are some things I really like in Vray, like the lights, and there are some things I just struggle to get my head around, like optimising render settings. I find exposure control more tricky in Vray unless I go down the physical camera route. I like the ability to have different exposures for each camera.

 

More and more though I still prefer to use mental because it feels right for me. At the end of the day it is a personal choice, use what works for you.

 

jhv

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I wonder how much your preference is based on the engine you are first successful with in professional production? I started on scanline, but the first modern engine I moved to was Vray. About 2 and a half years ago I switched to Mental Ray for a year and a half. I tried and tried to get the results I was getting from Vray, but I never felt like I go there. I always felt like my image was lacking certain things that I liked about the Vray engine. Eventually this forced me to switch back to Vray.

 

I wonder if my first modern engine was Mental Ray instead of Vray if my preference would have been different? Maybe I would prefer Mental Ray in that case.

Edited October 20, 2010 by Crazy Homeless Guy

[Camby1298]

I wonder how much your preference is based on the engine you are first successful with in professional production? I started on scanline, but the first modern engine I moved to was Vray. About 2 and a half years ago I switched to Mental Ray for a year and a half. I tried and tried to get the results I was getting from Vray, but I never felt like I go there. I always felt like my image was lacking certain things that I liked about the Vray engine. Eventually this forced me to switch back to Vray.

 

I wonder if my first modern engine was Mental Ray instead of Vray if my preference would have been different? Maybe I would prefer Mental Ray in that case.

 

Nope, I started with mr, and dont look back at all now that Im on Vray

[Justin Hunt]

I think there is an element of that, my first "modern" render engin was Brazil, dispite being really slow I loved its quality. Just a pity that its development was too slow. I havn't tried brazil2 though.

 

jhv

[Stan Zaslavsky]

i'm now pretty much converted to vray .. i found a great plugin called Sigershaders materials that have some sample materials - so i just need to customise them, but they are pretty optimised for vray which replaces the A&D set for me.

 

other than that psd manager works with vray just as well and i'm starting to scratch the surface with elements - ambient occlusion rocks!

 

justin i too am having troubles with exposure control - mental ray was much easier in that sense, but all in all, its just a matter of getting used to the way the system operates.

[Bruce Hart]

I wonder how much your preference is based on the engine you are first successful with in professional production?

 

There is always a lot of bias in the MR vs VR debate, like so many other programs, due to people having extensive knowledge and experience of using one peice of software, and nowhere near as much of the other. It makes threads like this one and so many others before a bit of a waste of time IMO. I guess there are not too many people who are absolute experts in both - knowing all the tricks and optimizations. Those people would be the ones who could make an unbiased appraisal.

 

I've gone from scanline, Brazil, Mental Ray and now Vray. I used Brazil about the same time Justin was having a go at it (being in the same office). We didn't do too much interior lighting if I recall, but it was OK. In recent times, I feel changing from MR to Vray is one of the best things I've done in my career to date.

 

As already mentioned - if a package works for you, and gives good results - great.

[pand0r]

... just like the city engine lite included w/2011.

 

Where do I find this in 3ds Max? I've been looking for it but I can't find it...

[John Dollus]

http://forums.cgarchitect.com/40514-autodesk-ships-cityscape-3ds-max-3ds-max-design-2011-a.html

 

sorry - cityscape not cityengine. my mistake

[erickdt]

I've never used Mental Ray before so I can't speak to that but I can say that I love working with VRay. I find it's materials and lightings very easy to set up and very easy to wrap your mind around to the point where you can easily and quickly set up a scene and, to a certain point, know how it's going to render our before you even do your first test render. Sort of along the same lines: the new version of VRay (VRay 2) promises to have the hardware renderer (AKA VRay RT) built right in. The beauty in that is that it uses native VRay materials and lighting so your hardware renders would translate very predictably to production renders. I'm wondering whether I'll be doing any more "production" renders after VRay 2 is released...

 

E

[Ricardo Eloy]

I wonder how much your preference is based on the engine you are first successful with in professional production?

 

I started with scanline (pretty much the only thing we had back in 1995), then a few years later tried Ghost, then Brazil, Ray Max, final render, mr and finally found VRay, in 2001/2002. I remember that "customer support" was already incredible, Vlado actually replied most e-mails himself. And, one of the most important things for me, I ended up growing along with VRay, from its reeeeally simple first GI set to the point we are now. So, it feels natural to work with VRay nowadays. Don't see myself switching to mr or any other package anytime soon.

[gato_maxx]

Some problems Blur had while using Mental Ray on its cinematics (from the article in CgSociety):

 

"We had RAM issues on large environments without a functioning proxy system, render times were rising unacceptably high attempting to resolve sampling and GI flickering, vector moblur and Z-Depth DOF in post started to feel very dated,"

 

What Vray gave them:

 

"Seeing how V-Ray could easily produce creamy smooth GI lighting, camera DOF and motion blur, fast displacements and BSP instancing/proxy objects caught my attention."

[wasteland giant]

not an autodesk product (auotdesk just play desperate catchups to vray).

 

 

but technically MR isn't an autodesk product - well it didn't start off that way. That's like saying "if vray was bought by autodesk, its no good". Autodesk has also since purchased Maya.. so the alias wavefront/autodesk debate .. well, I don't read that much of it anymore.

 

 

Its caught up really well since. The MR proxy stuff still needs work though but I've render 56million polygons in a forest the other day with MRproxy. I like the integrated MR material library + promaterials in max. works good.

 

* I very much prefer using vray lights though. That's the one thing that I wish MR would have.

Edited October 20, 2010 by wasteland giant

[BVI]

The major factor here is application and industry. For Arch Vis, VRAY makes sense, its quick to setup and has great results with limited tinkering. MR is used by film houses to produce photo real results - they also need endless settings and maximum control over shaders, camera and render settings.

[gato_maxx]

Well, BVI, Blur studios produces cinema quality cinematics, and they had a LOT of problems using Mental ray in their pipeline, like:

 

"We had RAM issues on large environments without a functioning proxy system, render times were rising unacceptably high attempting to resolve sampling and GI flickering, vector moblur and Z-Depth DOF in post started to feel very dated,"

 

I think those are quite serious issues, dont you agree?

[BVI]

Well, BVI, Blur studios produces cinema quality cinematics, and they had a LOT of problems using Mental ray in their pipeline, like:

 

"We had RAM issues on large environments without a functioning proxy system, render times were rising unacceptably high attempting to resolve sampling and GI flickering, vector moblur and Z-Depth DOF in post started to feel very dated,"

 

I think those are quite serious issues, dont you agree?

 

Whats your point? MR is used for feature films by ILM and the like.

[AJLynn]

This depends a lot on what you're doing. FX studios are using mr and Renderman all over the place, so you can't exactly go by one article and decide one thing is categorically better than the other. Also note that Blur is talking about an older version of mental ray - for the last 3 or so Max versions, mr has had proxies.