Sunday, September 13, 2009

Vray Switch

Hey folks, I have some news. I've been testing Vray and RT over the last few weeks. And now that Vray for Maya is a reality, I can seriously consider switching. While I love 3dsmax for many things, I still feel Maya is required for many tasks, and wouldn't be without it in production. I'm getting pretty comfortable with Vray in both Max and Maya, and have to say it is a big step up from Mental Ray, which has unfortunately languished for the past few years with few useful updates.

There are things I can do in Vray, that I just couldn't accomplish properly with MentalRay. Many may argue, you can do the same quality work in MR, and short of true DOF and MB in reasonable time, I would agree. However, the man-hours required to do the same level of work are vastly different. Vray's unified DMC sampling (global glossy settings) and many other features I'll discuss later, make setting up complicated realistic settings very easy. I have already done work with vray that I doubt I could have done in twice the time in MR. saving caches, baking, importance sampling in image and area lights... the list goes on, and I have to say I wish only that I had jumped in earlier. More soon.

BTW, due to a few Russian spam comments, I've turned on posting administration. Thus your comments may take a day to show, since I have to approve them. But I'll generally let any post through that isn't spam. Even if you hurl insults;)