![]() It does offer support for XGen, which could work, but XGen comes with its own problems currently. Although Vray has its own fur implementation, it is somewhat useless for characters, as it doesn’t have any grooming features. With Vray, there is often a need to rely on additional plugins for support of similar features. One is the more extensive support for some of Maya’s features like fur, hair, xGen, bifrost, and fluids. There are still some important differences that give mental ray some advantages, aside from the obvious cost difference. This, in addition to the fact that it is so much more reliable and stable, makes it a no-brainer as the renderer of choice currently as both a CPU and GPU solution. However, now that Vray has decreased its render time significantly with version 3.0, the render times are either pretty much on par with mental ray, or even faster. It has a strong set of essential and advanced features for production use, and it renders pretty fast once you learn how to use the settings. In addition to this, there is the Vray dirt material as well, which offers more features than the mental ray‘s occlusion node.Īside from cost, one of the biggest reasons that I stuck with mental ray for so long (and I have tested Vray in the past several times, as well as other render engines), has been the fact that it offered support for pretty much everything in Maya. For example, the Vray material offers multiple shader types for specularity, it doesn’t require the additional bump 2D or 3D node for connecting a texture to the bump attribute, offers Dispersion of refraction, and it also has a built-in SSS feature that allows for very realistic, physically-correct materials. The Vray materials have more features, and are somewhat easier to work with.This is an essential feature for compositing, and one of the big reasons that Vray became so much more popular in VFX production. The Vray render elements system is MUCH easier to use and setup than the render passes system in Maya.There currently isn’t even a Maya 2016 version yet (as of August 2015). It’s also an added expense, lacks GPU and viewport support, and is entirely independent of the mental ray plugin. In the past I had to rely on Holomatix’s SprayTrace, for previous versions of Maya, and although it worked pretty decently, it still has several limitations compared to Vray RT. Not only is it pretty slow and lacks a GPU option, but it also crashes all the time. Unfortunately for mental ray, the current Maya implementation of progressive rendering through the IPR is absolutely awful. This is an extremely handy and time-saving feature. ![]() The Vray RT offers a fantastic, and very handy solution for real-time preview, as well as GPU rendering.It seems to have gotten worse and worse starting with Maya 2015. It can crash for no apparent reason, can be extremely sensitive to render bucket sizes during command-line renders, and it requires me to reboot the workstation every time before I start using Maya. The mental ray satellite, on the other hand, requires a much more complicated setup by comparison, and is extremely finicky. I rely a lot on distributed rendering of single images, and the Vray setup just works out of the box, with no additional tweaking required. MUCH better distributed rendering setup, with no bugs and crashes.The Vray GI is simply better than whatever mental ray has to offer currently, in terms of features and speed, especially for interiors. Significantly better GI solutions and control.Not only am I able to use Maya while Vray is rendering, but I have access to a slew of additional cool features like mouse cursor based buckets, adaptive subdivision of buckets when the render reaches the end, better history buffer and controls for comparisons, and quick access to preview render elements/passes. The Vray render view is a lot more useful overall than the Maya framebuffer, over which mental ray has no control unfortunately. Here are some of the advantages that I found to be extremely beneficial in everyday use: Vray Advantages So far, my experience with Vray has been mostly very good, and I find it significantly better than the mental ray experience in Maya. Over the past few months I have been playing around with Vray for Maya, and also with adapting the material design method popularized by Grant Warwick to a Maya workflow.
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