Which Render Engine should I choose?
polycounter lvl 5
I am using autodesk maya 2016 and wondering which render engine should I choose, mental ray or v-ray?
I used mental ray already and am interested to hear your thoughts, thank you
(by used I mean watched Digital tutors tutorials about it and rendered a few images myself, but not an expert)
I used mental ray already and am interested to hear your thoughts, thank you
(by used I mean watched Digital tutors tutorials about it and rendered a few images myself, but not an expert)
Replies
Mental ray is kinda outa dated, nobody really use it anymore,
hf !
CPU Render
a) Mental Ray gives you most control of the bunch but also the least intuitive. They're improving the interface a lot as of late and since it's free anyway you should give it a shot and see if you like it.
b) V-ray is in the middle. Lots of settings you can play with (not as much as MR), moderately intuitive, allow you reasonable amount of optimization tricks including GI caching and etc.
c) Then you have the other end of the spectrum, minimal settings which makes it much more intuitive but at the same time you don't have a whole lot of way to optimize your render time (because there's not a whole of settings exposed to you). These are Arnold, the new RIS Renderman.
The good thing about a) and b) are that you can cut down a lot of render time IF you have a knowledgeable team member.
The good thing about c) is that it will render almost everything you throw at. And since you can only adjust very few settings, it's easy to keep the quality consistent among very large team. However you really have no way to reduce render time. Ideal for big studio with large render farm imo.
You can try Mental Ray and Renderman for free so why not give them a spin?
we have a little farm and need a lot of masking stuff. so vray was the best move.
i have done smoe reavaluation in the last month. i tested arnold, mr, renderman and redshift.
arnold: great render engine fast for lookdev. optimized for animation and huge amount of data... works really fast if you have a lot of direct light... but you need a lot of rendering power to clean up noise if there is a lot of indirect light in the scene... i wont use it for interour renderings on a single machine... render mask support is to complicated without scripting... its a brute force only gi solution so no way to speedup things with baked gi... you need to work the arnold way...
https://www.solidangle.com/arnold/download/
mental ray: mr is not outdated at all like "the internet" is saying... it has the most modern gi (GPU) solution... but the problem here is.. its not done.... mr in is the middle of the transition to the new system.... there are the new MILA shaders and the gi next. but there is a lot of geo translation and other stuff missing... its unfinished but could be back on top in two years i think... mental ray 3.14 is in beta now... could be a surprise for some render gurus... (nvidia likes to sell graphics cards).
https://blog.mentalray.com/2016/02/22/mental-ray-for-maya-beta-with-nvidia/
renderman: since version 19 renderman is a pathtracer... the new RIS system is much easier to use and similar to arnold or vray... its much better integrated and moving really fast in development... R21 is just around the corner... and there is a free non commercial version.! its a must try for erveryone... rendering speed is similar to arnold you would need a little farm if you need to render animations.
https://renderman.pixar.com/view/non-commercial-renderman
redshift: red is a new GPU renderer for animation.. Its really fast on a geforce 980. if there is a lot of direct light its 5 times faster than vray.. for freelance without a farm i would go with redshift.. its a new renderer so some parts are missing but they are working on version 2.0... works only with nvidia cards at the moment...
https://www.redshift3d.com/downloads
conclusion::
for our studio --> stay with vray (use redshift on smaller projects)
for freelance --> redshift
how is this tutorial" http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/news/2012/11/v-ray-fundamentals-materials-lights-and-linear-workflow-with-stephen-delalla/
got any other resources to recommened other than that one I posted, and again I want to follow it so please let me know how is it
You shouldn't limit yourself to vray for maya tuts. Have a look at the vray for max tuts also. Practically the same in both. I learned a lot from the older gnomon vray series for maya- which is very in depth- even though I use max.
thank you, I am learning from this course right now, http://www.lynda.com/Maya-tutorials/Learning-V-Ray-Maya-Professional-Reference-Guide/126058-2.html
have a good day