Honestly, I used Vray the past 5 years for animation it became much to expensive for render farm cost for me. I switched to Cycles a half year ago and now the costs are almost down to 1/8 of that. Also its faster and has less noise in the channels. The shading system of Blender is way better to manipulate and extend. There are of course power features in Vray, like proxies and render booleans. But, in general I do not miss it at all.
More then this Chaos will try to sell you Vantage, there realtime engine, which is not bad, but once Vulcan is in Blender, pretty useless.
Keep in mind, in order to use it, you would need to buy a subscription, depend on OS restrictions and become totally dependent to there expensive render license system. All shader would need to be converted and adjusted and lot of there render technology is very old and oudated.
Some bits of information suggesting there is interest/progress in integrating Chaos products into Blender.
This discussion was happening at:
hmm hmm and yet Chaos is not able to share any serious reply on their oficial forum.
Seeing is believing, my friend. Unfortunately, companies like ChaosGroup are taking advantage of the reputation that Blender has built in the industry, solely to capture the attention of a declining customer base.
I waited years and years for a stable version of Blender, years…
Creating materials was never realistic in Blender with V-Ray. Poorly integrated nodes, lack of a corporate response, few or no dedicated developers to the project. It never became complete, and I don’t believe it ever will.
I apologize for the pessimism; I used to be a big fan of V-Ray.
But unfortunately, there is no real interest in Blender and its large user community.
They think Blender users are basic and kids playing with 3D during recess, disregarding them as true professionals with professional needs.
The most regrettable thing of all is that they keep selling the same product for years, deceiving people left and right.
How many blender users do you think would pay the v-ray subscription cost? Hundreds of users, thousands, or a couple dozen?
Probably the question should be done after offering a final and updated product.
The last Vray4Blender is too old to be compared in sales…and the new one is not existing except for some rare post spreaded from Vlado Facebook page or Chaos forum or some conference…so it’s difficult to attract customers without a product to offer…
Surely the actual customer of Vray4Blender are very few but meanwhile the CG scene is different and I can read more and more the word Blender inside the 3dsmax section of Vray forum…In my opinion, but it’s just my feeling, the interest on Blender is increased also inside the 3dsmax (archviz) users…
If this is enough for a successful commercial release of a new Vray4Blender version, it’s not easy to say… Chaos has all the tools to forecast this.
In my opinion, the main concern about Chaos on Vray4Blender is that they never cleared their view…leaving everyone in this limbo.
To solve for “x” in your equation, it is sufficient to multiply the number of professional users, which I believe is more than a hundred or a thousand, and we should also add many 3ds Max and Maya users who might want to consider migrating their studios completely to Blender. Chaos Group’s interest in Blender is not about selling more licenses with Blender. In my humble opinion, Chaos Group’s interest is to maintain their presence in the mouths of everyone, in the ranking of top rendering software worldwide, where they have been declining for various reasons. In my view, they made a mistake; they should have accepted the deal offered by Autodesk before the acquisition of ArnoldRender. As they say in my country, they tried to let out a fart bigger than their ass, and it backfired on them.
To make it clear,
The existence of V-Ray + Blender did not happen because a company like Chaos Group made it possible. Primarily, V-Ray for Blender emerged from the need and initiative of Andrei Izrantcev, who, through sheer determination, legally integrated almost all aspects of V-Ray into Blender.
It was a remarkable work, by the way.
Subsequently, Chaos Group, recognizing the talent and work he had accomplished, naturally attracted him to their team to utilize his knowledge in integrating V-Ray with other programs.
Everything that came afterward for Blender was pure smoke, and they don’t want to admit it because they made the grave mistake of selling licenses to people who believed in them.
V-Ray never came close, by any means, to what it was for other programs in terms of usability.
I personally tinkered with it quite a bit and used it to render some things, and I can tell you firsthand that this V-Ray for Blender is just a pastime for Chaos Group.
I used Modo render a few years, till they screwed it, then used a few years Vray. CyclesX was the needed step to get away from Vray and I have to say, that Cycles brought not only the speed and eaee of Modos old render back, but also the creativity control, I always missed in Vray. I see no point using Vray ever again. If you want to be mote realistic or more features go Octane, but in general Cycle will also get there. And if think about vantage, either wait for Eevees next or use D5.
I agree and also add here Chaos Corona too.
Largely Blender is in fact made up of basic hobbyists with a professionals using Blender and a lot of them are using it in conjunction with other software, meaning Blender may not be their main app of choice. Many are using it specifically for modeling or layout. We use it just for modeling and move to other apps like C4D and Houdini. You cry tears because of Vray but in fact the other devs can’t sell subs either and have let their dev slow down or lapse. Redshift is way behind. Octane is in perpetual beta, especially with the sole developer also maintaining Redshift for Houdini which is where the money is at. Arnold never tried. Renderman is a joke in Blender. Your fanboy bias is showing. The fact is it’s extremely hard for some of these larger companies to do business with Blender because of open source and the rules with licensing. It’s redesigning their code specifically for licensing just to appease a SMALL audience. You’re over-estimating Blender in the professional arena. it has its place but it’s not the end all be all and is still not a main DCC for most studios (as evidenced by job openings)
Also, and more importantly, they are finding out that many blender users do NOT want to pay a subscription for anything if they can help it. Honestly, a majority of comments by blender users on other 3D software and youtube videos is how they use Blender because it’s free. Even pros who use Blender won’t commit to paying $500 or so a year for a render engine FOR Blender. They’ll suffer with Cycles or export out and use something like Houdini which is more robust w/Karma XPU or Redshift. It’s just how it is. Ultimately most blender die hards are content with Cycles and eevee, even though they’ve never really had access to other engines.
It will be fun to see what Insydium prices their X-particles for Blender at
More people would use external engines if not for the fact that the GPL largely bans the tight integration with anything outside of the FOSS ecosystem, this is why it is so important that the ecosystem gets highly developed and why Blender has to become that one-stop-shop for end-to-end content creation (so the license does not become a prison that threatens to kill off the Blender project).
The issue with needing to get a special build is that it limits you to release builds, and even then only if the company bothers to update it. I would also disagree that Blender since version 2.8 is a project that is entirely dependent on its status as being free, as it is no longer that little toy app. that could not even be compared to Lightwave or Carrara. I really do not think Blender as a project would literally die overnight if Maya and Max got a free or low-cost indie-friendly tier.
For anyone interested…
It seems that Chaos Group had announced a new development of Vray For Blender… as it was becoming more or less a mith, I hope that now there will be something more real.
Nope…
My experience with them:
Chaos Group announce… wait at a least 3 years.
Chaos Group confirms… wait 1 year
Chaos Group develop … wait 2 years
Well…now it’s more a problem for them than me… I mean that I think that everyone interested in Vray and had already switched to Blender, more or less, had to find alternatives…so if Chaos announces and nothing happen for other 2 or 3 years…well, nothing change for everyone had switched to other renderers…
The positive thing is that if it will happen for real, we have a new and one more option that could increase the Blender userbase.
If it will not happen…well…no damage for Blender…
Chaos employee confirms that the V-Ray for Blender is under development and it’ll be just and an addon version and not a custom build.
I’ve read it… next days I’ll ask them if they’ll release also a Linux version… I’m quite skeptical that this will be… but dreaming is free
Keep in mind:
- VRay does not support Linux
- VRay does not yet support Silicon Macs (Developers of C4D stated that they do not want to, but I’m not up to date)
- VRay does not support AMD/ATI, just Nvidia
- VRay price rices every year.
- VRay is not Corona Render.
- VRay GPU support is missing a lot, no compare to Cycles.
- VRay images are always noisy.
The update on some changes/rumors around V-Ray for Blender integration.
One of the V-Ray for Blender developers is confirming that the integration is being actively worked on:
This time it’s for real, and we’re actively working on a new version of V-Ray for Blender. We’ll keep you posted if there is anything new we can share.
The integration will be a separate installer/addon. Not a custom Blender build. I think it’s using new V-Ray API which made this possible.
The are no plans for MacOS/Linux support, though. Only Windows. MacOS and Linux support might be added later based on user feedback.
Current developer builds are working on Blender 4.1 and 4.2 versions.
Cycles is quite close to capability of V-Ray these days but much better integrated into Blender. If they released V-Ray for Blender like decade ago, it’d be a success, but these days, it will be wasted development resources.
Those whom already used both Cycles and V-Ray know that there’s not that much difference, some niche features aside, and even those are not worth the productivity hit in terms of worse integration.
Those who know V-Ray just from the myths about it being the most popular renderer and will try it for the first time will probably be disappointed that it’s not much faster, doesn’t look much better, and contains dozens of cryptic parameters no one these days wants to deal with.