I’m looking to see if Vray used with Blender would be the right fit for me, any input would be appreciated.
The overall impression that I get about Vray is that it’s THE renderer to use since it’s fast, high quality and reasonably affordable. Is this true? My main usage would be for integration of 3D with live footage or motion graphics, so the ability to render fast and as animations is essential, as well as being cross platform.
I’ve gone to the ChaosGroup website but I can’t figure out if they have a demo version available or even what the pricing is.
Vray has a much better integration with 3DS Max than Blender. If you are using Blender you should stick to more tightly integrated renderers like BI or Yafaray (or, in the future, Cycles) - IMHO.
vray is awesome if you can afford, i think it coasts around 350$ for the stand alone version, on the other hand cycles is free but immature, if you wait it will be there -I.A.W.-, as for integration bdancer’s exporter are in a good status and evolving, i think it could be used for production.
I suppose I should PM him to get details. I’m looking for a good speed/quality ratio that can be used in a mixed environment with Blender and C4D. If there are other renderers out there that fit the bill I’d be glad to hear about them. I need good integration, and I’m not really interested in a unbiased solution because they’re simply too slow.
Hi, I just found this thread, and thought I share my 2 cents.
I would definitely recommend vray.
I don’t know skycooler’s experiences, but I find vray to be really REALLY good integrated. You really almost do not notice you are using an external renderer at all. Since 2.5 the exporter is perfectly integrated into the interface and works accordingly to Max/Maya Interface settings.
So you can grab ANY tutorial on the web about vray and transfer it 1:1 to blender and the vray exporter. Well, more or less.
It is indeed super fast to render and comfortably to use.
I am going to produce a tutorial about it the next weeks, you might wait for that one instead of getting the current tutorial on cmivfx.
Yeah, i will be covering most of that, as this can be really confusing.
But of course I’ll also cover Irradiance Map, Lightcache, DMC Sampler, Colormapping, Materials, Textures etc.
The standalone is 350€, i got mine from Evermotion. http://www.evermotion.org/modelshop/show_product/v-ray-standalone/2703/0/0
For the demo you need to register at the website from Chaosgroup. www.chaosgroup.com
From there you can download the demo.
If you’re on osx, use the leopard version (not 64bit), because IIRC there is a problem with displaying the VFB (Framebuffer window) with a 64bit version.
true that, however you could prepare renderings with 32bit, and then, when everything’s fine, switch to 64renderer for the final big renderings. though tedious still…
Sebastian, this thread has gotten pretty excited to try vray. Are you done with that video yet?
I was wondering, however, does vray support blender’s hair and particles? If i want to animate furry characters, is vray a viable option? Memory efficient object instancing? Smoke and fire sims? Fluid sims? I kinda doubt it supports all that, but one can dream!
blender’s hair&particle is unbeatable!
but in fact you can use hair&fur with vray, unfortunately until now no children particles though, AFAIK.
For furry animals I’d use Blender, it is really great in that area.
What it does support very well is instancing.
You can even use particle instancing!
This image has over 2 Billion vertices and rendered in an okay time. (don’t look too close at my lighting and shading, it was just a test).
oh, and that video will still take a while…
i hope to finish in the next 2 weeks
if you can wait a little bit, i am doing a big vray tutorial on cmivfx, i hope to finish in the next weeks.
in the meantime check out the official help http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/maya/150R1/
Love your CMI tutorials, so I’ll definitely check it out when yours is done. And thanks for the official help link. The Chaos Group website is like digging through some kind of archaic tome.
What would you do with that info anyways. If someone says it works good you’d buy a license without trying it?
Download the demo and try it.
I’ve seen no major issues as of yet, besides the vray downloads from chaosgroup being painfully slow… (~8-10kb)
Yes, the demo and full version have the same feature range, the demos limitations are a watermark in the upper left corner, and the render output is limited to 600x450.
Even the vray material preview works within Blender (similar to Luxrays embeded material preview)
Here’s a free tutorial from cmiVFX about installing V-Ray and the V-Ray/Blender exporter. It’s not that exciting, but really, the installation can be quite a challenge, especially on OSX or Linux. At least for me it was
There will be a second part soon, where I’ll cover render-settings, materials, textures, baking, compositing, color-mapping etc.
