VRay/etc tutorials

[Jason]

Hi there,

I hear a lot about how much easier/faster it is to get good looking images from VRay and other renderers. Can anyone point me to tutorials on this? I'm curious as to what makes it so much easier.

I'm especially interested in tutorials with downloadable resources, so I can try one-to-one workflow and technical comparisons.

Thank you,

Jason

[zasid]

Hello Jason,

For vray tutorials

http://www.vray.us/vray_tutorials/

and at www.evermotion.org

for complete Vray latest manual you can go over here http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/150SP1/

I can't find it but there were like 52 vray videos that explains almost all the things about this renderer.

One of the studio is using vray for production quality work its in Canada :http://www.richardrosenman.com/animation/

you can cotact this guy for any specific question but he is usually too busy to reply but you can give it a try HTH .

Zasid.

[Jason]

Hello Jason,

For vray tutorials

http://www.vray.us/vray_tutorials/

and at www.evermotion.org

for complete Vray latest manual you can go over here http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/150SP1/

I can't find it but there were like 52 vray videos that explains almost all the things about this renderer.

One of the studio is using vray for production quality work its in Canada :http://www.richardrosenman.com/animation/

you can cotact this guy for any specific question but he is usually too busy to reply but you can give it a try HTH .

Zasid.

Thank you, Zasid!; perhaps a good thing would be for us to start a "Migrating From VRay To Mantra" wiki page on OdWiki which might help people find familiar functions in both renderers, as well as parallel tutorials.

[andrewlowell]

I'd really like to see a good comparison from a Mantra Expert! (Jason)

I used VRay at a studio I used to work at and really hated the thing. Granted this was around two years ago now, but it was very slow compaired to my favorite 3ds Max renderer, Final Render. I think what may make it easy is simply it's implementation in 3ds Max, which is top notch for renderers; but since rendering isn't my area I really couldn't give any good info to prove what I'm talkin' bout.

Waiting for more info

[Andz]

Hey Jason,

I have used Vray in max. Just let me know if I can help you in anithing.

Will you be using houdini for your tests?

[kubabuk]

Jason, if you need to get very specific technical info I recommend to contact Vlado directly (vray developer). I don't know how he finds the time for that but he was so kind to explain many technical issues behind vray. PM me if you need more info.

kuba

[Matt_K]

A v-ray / mantra comparison and guide on the wiki would be wicked!

I have some experience using v-ray with Cinema4D and if I can help in any way, please let me know.

The V-Ray for C4D forums have a fair bit of info and some downloads too.

Hope it helps!

Matt.

[petz]

what

[jason_slab]

afaik vray has a very fast gi solution for stills but when it comes to animation mental ray seems to be the first choice. provided that gi is involved!

petz

i can't say i agree, from my experience vray is a lot more stable(GI/FG flickering wise) than MR. Maybe the latest version of mental ray's FG is better now that it has a brute force engine, i still need to test it.

jason S

[Jason]

I must say that I know very little about VRay but so far I am quite impressed by the fact that they don't sugar-coat things too much. I like that they keep things named by their technical names instead of coming up with kool terms for things.

Along the road, I would like to get the bottom of statements like "It's so easy to get good looking results from VRay" and such. Is it the renderer speed, functionality or "quality"? Is it the defaults? Is it the plug-ins? The bundled resources? If you have any insights into what makes VRay/mental ray/FPrime/Lightwave rendering work for you, please share:)

[zasid]

One thing I like about Vray is that its standard shader model that lets u create various shading model from one interface rather than messing u around with millions of shading model.The model is very good for Archi stuff mostly.Yes there are few tabs that lets you create those good looking images ,you are most of the scenarios suppose to check before rendering.The Primary and Sec bounce handling thing in Vray is I think the key to its success .

[jason_slab]

hey jason

i think it's a few area's, some witch you can find in MR too, like:

Vray material as Zasid was saying, it's like the the Mental Ray Architectural shader, it's a bit more of a Physically based shader with built in BRDF, it's also energy conserving.

this shader/material seems to be good for most surfaces glass/wood/concrete/metal/water and so on and so on...

link to Vray material: http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/150SP1/material_params.htm

GI is really easy (especially for stills), again like FG in Mental Ray, all you really have to do is turn it on and you got yourself a pretty good looking starting place

for me, well i'm used to using FG, so setting up or tying to come up with a GI work flow in Houdini just seems strange.

OK I'm totally not into just pushing a make pretty button, it's the quick out of the box setup/tools that i like.

vray light and sun light is great to, i like the fact that you can use Lumious power/radiant watts, this works great if your using the Physical camera!

http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/150SP1/exa...sicalcamera.htm

i'm also really liking the IES lights in the newer version of Vray. would be nice to be able to use these in Houdini:)

hey let me stop there, I'm beginning to sound like i work for vray:)

ok, again i just wanted to say, they really do have the tools to setup quick good looking renders,

unlike Houdini/mantra, i find myself having to search and read loads of posts here on Odforce before i can get a good looking render, although it's slowly changing as i learn more and more, i still find it, well painful, because i know i could just bash a render out in XSI(Mental Ray) in much less time.

jason

Edited July 22, 2008 by jason_slab

[Netvudu]

Ok, here goes my two cents regarding why I love LW

[mentor]

Yes, we need good GI in matra - fast and flexible

[zasid]

I really love how gud mantra is in handling displacements and motion blur and DOF which is blazing fast I guess.Yes I think it does need some gud ways to improve its Gi Handling.

[jason_slab]

yeah displacements and motion blur is really cool in mantra, i've been doing some Zbrush/Mantra displacement tests for a day or two.

I'm really impressed, the newer version of MR(XSI 7) is also seems much better, but it's still a memory hog, especially when you turn on motion blur

Mantra sits at about 250mb ram while rendering my scene with displacement and motion blur

Mental Ray sits at about 2.2gigs of ram for the same scene.

i must still test it on Vray, hopefully tomorrow i'll get to it:)

so mantra wins in this area for me:)

jason

[zasid]

Hey Jason

yeah I agree with u Mantra just smells ur ram while rendering ,where as other renderers take a lot of it .Matra I think is the most memory efficient rendrer I think with a renderer like manta u can pull out some decent job on PIII computer lolzzz

Jason Can you please post your zbrush Mantra workflow over here as I am doing a similar project and it would be really really helpful for me .

Many Thanks

Zasid

[JDenker]

zasid, you don't want to be in my position right now hehe. I have two P4 Processors with each 2gig RAM.. Mantra is hating me, i have to optimize so much stuff and cannot render a lot of that, what i had planned because memorywise its too heavy. I don't know. My opinion is, to render decent looking things in mantra you need a lot of RAM and a PIII. Maybe you where kidding about that, but i dont agree to it when it was your true opinion. Everything is so sloooow on these machines here and I'm in big deadline hell right now. I'm graduating in 4 Weeks. ah! Why the school hasn't any good computers! I don't like it

But besides that, i really learned to like Mantra, its well integrated which is important to me and it delivers good quality also in good time (when u have the machine for it).

In general Mantra for me is easier to understand than Mental Ray. I worked with it for two years and i never liked it that much.

Jason, why you trying out VRay? That's interesting because there are so much other good renders out there, too. So why Vray in particular.

Ever thought of 3delight or maxwell?

Cheers

-J

Edited July 23, 2008 by JDenker

[zasid]

Jdenker,

That's why I put lolzz in the end of my sentence.All I mean to say is that its really resource friendly as it use less amount of ram as compare to others. Thanks .

[Ole]

This is nice: http://vray.info/news/article.asp?ID=233