3DATS - VRay over Mental Ray - One Project

[dpinning]

Why was Vray chosen as the renderer over Mental Ray in the "One Project" book, when Mental Ray is included/part of 3ds Max?

 

(posted in 3ds Max, but perhaps more appropriate here) : )

[Scott Schroeder]

Ahh the good old, "Why should we pay extra for a rendering software when one comes with max?" As a user of both Mental Ray and Vray, I use Vray in industry and teach Mental Ray at a university, there are minimal quality differences between the two. You can make great images and animations with both.

 

For me, Vray is the clear winner because of one category and that's licensing. Mental Ray is licensed per CPU, so if you've got an awesome dual or quad CPU machine, you need 2 or 4 mental ray licenses to use all CPU's. Remember, this is the physical processor, not cores. Vray, on the other hand, is licensed per machine. You could hve 10,000 CPUs and still only need one Vray license. Network rendering is also another area, Mental Ray comes with 5 additional per cpu network licenses. Vray, has unlimited network licenses. Granted, this is all with the stand alone rendering versions, say if you are building a large render farm that just has mental ray or vray on it, not an network license install of max.

 

Even so with later builds of Max, I think since Max 8, they finally let users have mental ray with unlimited network licenses as long as there was a max install. Pre Max 8, that' wasn't the case. You needed a full Max license to enable Mental Ray. But licensing was always a selling point in the past, and many companies adopted Vray because of it.

 

Configuration is an issue, Mental Ray isn't as configurable as Vray, therefore tweaking for ultimate speed can be an issue. MR finally just adopted a proxy system, and Vray had it for a while. Though, even now, you cannot scale Mental Ray proxies using the transform tool (it crashes your scene) yet Vray proxies can be scaled and randomized. Materials, if you are a hard core shader coder then Mental Ray is better for you. Again, the Mental Ray materials aren't as configurable (at least with the MR Arch and Design Material) as the stock Vray material.

 

Personally, I think due to Mental Ray being so slow to adopt to certain issues, many companies went to Vray and aren't going to think about making the switch back.

[AJLynn]

mental ray included with Max let's you use a large number of render slaves and all the CPUs in the main workstation. There's no need to buy the mental ray standalone. Just install Max on the nodes and Raysat will run without an additional license for distributed buckets, and you can use Backburner for distributed frames.

[Scott Schroeder]

This is true. However, for most well defined production pipelines you don't want to load max simply to render and you are certainly not going to use crashy backburner if you have over 10-20 render boxes.. Think about all of the system resources that are wasted loading that hog of a program, resources that could be dedicated to rendering. This is where the stand alone rendering apps come into play. You don't have to hog resources loading a program like Max. Also, a big plus is the fact that these stand alone apps can run in a Linux environment where Max (as far as I know, unless 2012 has adopted it) doesn't work well or at all on a Linux platform. Using stand alone, the way to control render settings is customizable and it keeps artist for accidentally jacking up render settings and killing the farm. Though, I'd wager that many arch viz firms don't get this deep into rendering pipelines. This is more for large render farms, or film and VFX.

 

Sure network licensing is a non issue today, but that wasn't the case even just a few years ago. Remember, before Max 8 Mental Ray was really restrictive on network rendering. I'd bet a good chunk of change that right around this time, Vray really gained a foothold because of this. I know that was the sole reason the studio I worked at adopted Vray over Mental Ray.

[Justin Hunt]

I am sorry but most of your arguments are based on out dated information that just isn't relevant today.

 

jhv

[AJLynn]

Max 8 was... 2005? Don't worry about it, the way things are now you can use either of those renderers effectively. But if you start doing this on a regular basis, and if you find that you work better in Vray, get Vray - the time you will save and quality you will gain by using the one that works best for you will be worth $1000 one way or the other.

[Thablanch]

I am sorry but most of your arguments are based on out dated information that just isn't relevant today.

 

jhv

 

I have to agree..

But also, the users that picked Vray a few years ago are not going to switch to Mental Ray because it can do similar result..

If you have an efficient pipeline, you'll stick with it. It is also because Mental ray was not good/stable/efficient in the earlier (max 8) releases that Vray "took control" and became the most popular renderer in the field.

 

If a new user wants to try both, he will probalby find both about the same, result wise.

If trying to get the "older" professionals to switch, Mental ray needs to be something else than a good renderer, that can match Vray and included in the 3dsMax package, It needs to be better, and by far. And then, mabee Mental ray will grab more users.