Who works with Maxwell and Vray ?

frv

I am interested to preorder Vray. I am an experienced Maxwell user to render my SU models. I get good results. But I am always looking for better. Is there anyone here who has some hands-on experience with both, and can help me with these questions:

Would Vray speed up my renderproces, preparing the model for render in SU ?
Would Vray really be that much faster looking for the best quality Vray has to offer ?
Would it be that premade render trees, cars and other scenery models are easier to find for Vray than for Maxwell ?
Is it interesting to keep both renderengines ?
Can Vray do camera shift ?
Components from SU to Vray ?
Any other ideas on this matter ?

Any help on any of these questions are very appreciates.
Francois

remus

I dont use either myself but feel i know enough to have a go at answering some of your questions, hope you dont mind.

When you are proficient with vray i imagine the setup times will be fairly similar, getting that proficient with vray could take some time, though.
If you know how to setup vray correctly i think you can get it to render a given scene significantly faster than maxwell, again id say youd need a fair amount of practice before you got to the stage where you can reliably set up quick, good looking renders.
With maxwell you can always import models in to maxwell studio (where you can be more liberal with the number of polygons) so i think youd have a wider range of models to choose form with maxwell. having said that, anything you can get in to SU will be able to be rendered in both, so your going to have quite a large selection to choose from either way.
Theres no reason not to keep using them both.

frv

Tx, I would not use them both if the results are more or less simular in the eyes of my clients.
Faster rendering could be interesting although we render at night.

But in general I have a feeling Vray would be more costeffective, in terms of time to get to the final image and in terms of shared prematerialized models (cars, trees etc).

I just wonder if this feeling is justified. Maybe I would spend another 600 $ just to find myself on the beginning of a learning curve towards the same or even less results.
Francois

thomthom

@frv said:

Is there anyone here who has some hands-on experience with both, and can help me with these questions:

Only V-Ray.

@frv said:

Would Vray speed up my renderproces, preparing the model for render in SU ?

Not sure what the preparations are with Maxwell. But the process in VfSU is that you use the SU material as the base for your VfSU materials. You just add reflection, refraction and bump etc as needed. Mind you, in the current version it's a bit awkward as you can't copy/import materials from other models without loosing the VfSU info. You'd have to separately export and import the materials. But the beta in progress has fixed this and the VfSU data tags along with the Su materials, making it much easier to build libraries or inherit from older models.

@frv said:

Would Vray really be that much faster looking for the best quality Vray has to offer ?

In terms of rendering time and output quality then V-Ray can outpace any unbiased engine. I believe V-Ray is one of the fastest out there overall. But you need to learn the tricks to become efficient.

@frv said:

Would it be that premade render trees, cars and other scenery models are easier to find for Vray than for Maxwell ?

There is no libraries of pre-prepared VfSU objects. But I expect that's due to the current state of the materials system as I mention in point 1. With the new version you can now prep a component with all the VfSU materials.

@frv said:

Is it interesting to keep both renderengines ?

If you have Maxwell already then why not? You might find strengths in both for different purposes.

@frv said:

Can Vray do camera shift ?

Yes. But there's not auto-guessing of the shift.

@frv said:

Components from SU to Vray ?

Not sure what you mean by this.

@frv said:

Any other ideas on this matter ?

The current version of VfSU got some annoying quirks and makes for an awkward workflow in some cases.
But, they have rebuilt VfSU completely to make it compatible with Max. And while they've been at it, thrown in a bunch of really good new stuff. This next version, which just came out of pre-sale, is going to be a really good improvement! I'm currently in the beta and it's been one of my favourite beta testing experiences I've had.
And the good thing is that this new version will be offered for free for existing customers!

In general, from my experience with VfSU - it's takes a wee bit of time to get used to VfSU. You need to learn the shortcuts. But once you start to understand the general workings of it becomes increasingly easier. You know what to roughly set the settings to and you output your render very quickly.

frv

TX Thomthom,
very clear. For the components I just wondered if SU components remains to be components in Vray but maybe its not an issue really since you do not model anything in Vray as I understand.

Maxwell is not easy either, recently much faster though. I am waiting for a new plugin by JD for SU for Maxwell. He might improve things a lot.

I would move over to Vray if the set up to render is more friendly compared to Maxwell. We lose lots of time using Maxwell because of buggy or faulty material settings. Rendering a proper preview can take too much time as well with Maxwell since you have to export to Studio and work from there.
Francois

thomthom

@frv said:

For the components I just wondered if SU components remains to be components in Vray but maybe its not an issue really since you do not model anything in Vray as I understand.

Yea - Everything goes directly from SU to V-Ray. So that means you need to place all objects in SU. You can't fill in stuff in-between SU and V-Ray.

@frv said:

We lose lots of time using Maxwell because of buggy or faulty material settings

Atm, if you apply materials to groups/components, then VfSU will take an insane amount of time to parse the scene. Before it starts to render. But this has been fixed in the upcoming version.

@frv said:

Rendering a proper preview can take too much time as well with Maxwell since you have to export to Studio and work from there.

This is very nice in VfSU. You just set a low setting, specifically for what you want to test, light, colours, materials etc. I can often save a few presets for my models which I use to quickly swap between test and production.

If you are going to get VfSU - then you might be lucky and get a special deal now that they are doing pre-sale of the new version.

frv

Yes, I saw the pre-order discount. But we had a hard time with Maxwell using the first versions. I am afraid I will pass this time and wait for the first signs of a solid and well tested version of VfSU on OSX. As I understand the current version VfSU (PC version) is not yet properly developed either.
Francois