Brazil, Vray, or Mental ray

[jr MOon]

I have a dual pentium p4 Zeon with 3 Gigs of ram and a wildcat video card on dual monitors, no question my computer (supplied by my engineering firm) rocks. My question is do I need to purchase a rendering engine other than the mental ray built into Max 7. I have been a long time Maya user but I have started getting into architectural design more and more and I find that Max is superior in this field. I have worked with Brazil RS before and I have to say that I loved it. I have only used the free version of Vray from there site and did'nt grasp it as quickly as I did Brazil. Mental Ray, as confusing as it is, renders great results...slowly. So what is the best rendering engine outside of Skywalker Ranch?

Thanks, Jay

[Elliot]

Jay,

 

I am as confused as you are..... I have been using the free VRay.... I just ran into a small issuea that can be solved if I use VRay materials.... Does it means that I will have to model under the bounds of VRay in order to get their engine to render?

 

Elliot

[PiXeL_MoNKeY]

It really comes down to what you require for your renders. MR is good, but can only use 3dsmax default materials and maps. Using 3rd party plugins such as procedural maps/mats, RPC, Afterburn, etc will not work with MR unless they have created a MR compliant plugin. MR is also very extendible, but it requires an understanding of their programming language or 3rd party MR mats/maps/lens/effects/etc. The 3rd party plugin renders such as Brazil, fR, and Vray should support most if not all 3rd party plugins for 3dsmax, or renders that don't use a standalone exe to render. My personal choice is Brazil. In early tests of Brazil vs MR I got faster renders with more features using Brazil.

 

Hope this helps some with your decision,

-Eric

 

P.S. ILM uses both MR and Brazil (Brazil in their matte painting division).

[mbr]

It's an ongoing debate. MR seems unanimously slow and complex, making it cumbersone for this biz. On top of that, if you ever want to expand and make a render farm, the licenses cost a fortune.

 

I use Final Render and am very happy with it. It's fast and there are numerous features that you can use to dial in perfection, or ignore and still have a nice image (I am somewhere in between those two).

 

For fR you can use distributed rendering on 10 computers (a limit they are working on eliminating) and, I believe, but don't quote me, unlimited render slaves.

 

Imo, the issue of licensure is enough to discard MR. Will that change? I doubt any time soon. They have a solid following in high end areas that want their level of customization (via programming/shaders/etc.). Plus, it's in Maya, Max, and Softimage, so there are plenty of people paying for the licenses. It's just a beast aimed at a different market.

[Christopher Nichols]

 

P.S. ILM uses both MR and Brazil (Brazil in their matte painting division).

 

Yeap... you will find that some of the big studios are jealous enough of the results people are getting with these rendering engines that small groups are using max just to be able to use them. I think Brazil was even used at Pixar for the Incredibles. But you did not hear that from me.

[PiXeL_MoNKeY]

I think Brazil was even used at Pixar for the Incredibles. But you did not hear that from me.

Yes it was, but since he didn't mention Pixar or Renderman I wasn't going to bring it up. For those interested in reading up about it here is a small quote from the Splutterfish PR on it:

 

"The second unit created 'digimattes' using 3ds max and Brazil," says [Rick] Sayre,[supervising technical director for The Incredibles,] referring to Discreet's 3D software program and SplutterFish's rendering software. "It was great fun, ... liberating."

And the full article originally posted by CGW at: http://cgw.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?Section=Articles&Subsection=Display&ARTICLE_ID=215639

 

-Eric

[Jim Mann]

I use both Vray and Brazil. I use Brazil for exteriors and Vray for interiors - I find this deployment gives the best resuts in terms of speed and quality. If I had to go with one package I would like it to be brazil for its ease of use, materials and sheer quality but so far (for me personally) it sucks when it comes to interiors. Vray on the other hand seems to thrive on interiors but is not as versatile as Brazil overall and you can spot a Vray render from a mile away. I can understand why matte departments are using Brazil.

 

If I had to recommend one...that would probably be Vray because it can handle both interiros and exteriors well..........

 

......ahhh but then I look at what Brazil does on exteriors and I think that maybe I should go for Brazil and use Max's radiosity for interiors...

 

What I actually did was to buy both and am very satisfied with that decision.

 

Hope you are not more confused.

[jr MOon]

Thanks for all the feedback evryone. I think I am going to stick with my Brazil RS and rely on MR for back up. I am trying to get an awesome rendering of an interior office, much like the renderings by smoke in the tutorials section, in order to convince my company to invest in a small render farm. The the images that smoke has up there are fantastic, the problem is that the tutorial is actually a very loose check list of the process he used to get the final results. What i am looking for is a step by step process or even a .max to reverse engineer. In paticular, I would like to find out how to get those glows around the windows or flourecents. Any help would be very appreciated.

P.S. I also hace Digimations Dreamscape, and I find that it often crashes during render when I use Brazil.

Thanks everyone.

[ShaunDon]

Holy crap, Jim -- I wish I could afford two third party renderers! ;-)

 

Brazil is the Cadillac, no doubt there. I bow to Blur and all they've spawned (some of their tests of Ghost, the predecessor to Brazil, had me in awe over the possibilities of CGI).

 

The only thing that I haven't seen mentioned here that makes the case for Vray for me (at least with arch-viz work) is the licensing scheme. It's significantly cheaper than Brazil and there's no licensing fee for render nodes. Last I checked, $1200 for Brazil bought you one artist license and two node license, but I haven't been in the market for a year or two. Vray's $750 a seat or so. And it also has distributive rendering, though from what I understand the new Max has the ability to parse regions of stills to different nodes these days. Even still, for doing working drafts while lighting interiors, having buckets kick back across the network right to my screen is mighty-fine.

 

Shaun