VRay RT general workflow and rendering

[jab]

I do product renderings for a furniture company, si I'm dealing with simple scenes.

 

My current workflow is to distribute render my image (avg times under an hour). I'm running a 12-core machine, and I'm using another 12 core and an 8 core machine as my slaves.

 

I'm currently rendering with Mental Ray but am thinking about switching to VRay RT. But I have a few questions about how RT even works.

 

1. Once the image is 'rendered' in your preview using RT, do you still press the Render button to start the whole process over or does some of the time RT took to make the preview for you transfer over to render time???

 

2. Also, can I slave out to my other machines using VRay only having one license or do I need multiple licenses???

 

3. Currently I installed the 3ds max trial version (which expired) on multiple machines around my office but I can still use these machines to render farm out my jobs if I'm doing an animation, can I do the same with VRay, or do I again, need multiple licenses on every machine?

 

4. How else can VRay RT help me to make a case in my company that its a worthwhile investment.

 

I hope this isn't too confusing. Thank you for any help you can provide.

 

James

[DavidR]

2. Also, can I slave out to my other machines using VRay only having one license or do I need multiple licenses???

3. Currently I installed the 3ds max trial version (which expired) on multiple machines around my office but I can still use these machines to render farm out my jobs if I'm doing an animation, can I do the same with VRay, or do I again, need multiple licenses on every machine?

4. How else can VRay RT help me to make a case in my company that its a worthwhile investment.

James

2. Like Max, you can render on 10,000 render slaves, and you can do DR (multiple machines rendering 1 image) on 10 machines.

3. You can do exactly the same with 1 Vray license.

4. I can't reply about RT because I'm still on Vray 1.5 and a 3-yr-old graphics card.

[Stephen Thomas]

RT won't do anything for your render times I'm afraid, but for product rendering especially it has a huge benefit in the time taken to set up materials and lighting. You can get real time feedback on lighting postition, shadows, highlights, reflections etc without the need for multiple test renders.

[SCH]

I also produce renders for furniture companies and use Vray 1.5 with RT. Like Stef said, RT won't help on render times but I'd hate to be without it now as I hardly ever need to do test renders as I can get everything set up in real time

[John Dollus]

just playing devils advocate here but why not use iray and stick with your MR workflow and save some money?

[erickdt]

As long as you don't exceed the memory limit of your graphics card wouldn't it be possible to use VRay RT for production quality renders? I've never used it before but have often wondered about this.

 

E

[alias_marks]

just playing devils advocate here but why not use iray and stick with your MR workflow and save some money?

 

This is just my own experience so take it for what it's worth. I tried iray when it came out and had lots of crashing issues and it didnt' come across as all that intuitive. This may have to do with my more limited knowledge of mental ray, but I've been on Vray RT for a bit now and it's worked a treat. i'm not sure what it was, but it also seemed that when I booted up iray, it slowed my viewport down (maybe I couldn't figure out how to turn gpu's off) = me being dense ... Not sure...

 

However when I use vray RT out of the box, it didn't slow my viewport down at all while I could have a real time window off on my other monitor.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

iRay and Vray RT ar different beasts as iRay is an unbiased engine which runs on the GPU, meaning you will need a significant investment in GPU's to get decent speed.

 

I haven't used Vray RT but I believe it is a biased engine which means it can fly on CPU calculations, therefore it will take advantage of the system you have.

 

Then there is Vray RT GPU, which I believe is in a similar class to iRay in that it is a unbiased engine that will do very fast calculations on advanced GPU's, but slow calculations on the CPU.

 

Biased = Fast CPU calculations.

Unbiased = Fast GPU calculations, but slow CPU calculations.

 

Currently I can still achieve render times that are quite a bit faster on the biased engines than I can on the unbiased engines. I will leave the quality of the images up to the individual user since unbiased is about 'real' world calculations, unbiased is about taking shortcuts to simulate real world calculations.

Edited January 26, 2011 by Crazy Homeless Guy

[John Dollus]

ah, good point Travis. I always assume when someone says RT, they are meaning the gpu version.