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| Hi everyone, I would like to convince the higher-ups at the company that purchasing VRay is a good idea to improve the quality of our renderings. It seems that in the AEC visualization industry VRay is a pretty standard package that is not too expensive. But, I can't get approval for VRay yet. The people with the purchasing power do not have any 3ds Max experience or knowledge. I have some experience with VRay and Mental Ray and it seems to be easier and faster to get good looking results from VRay. However, I don't know if this convenience is worth the extra money since Mental Ray now includes proxies too. But I also like the wealth of free VRay materials available (tutorials, materials - vraymaterials.de, etc). Does anyone have any good ideas, or know of any sources, that show how VRay can improve the look of our renderings and minimize scene setup and rendering time? It would be great if I could convince the company to buy a copy of VRay. Any input would be appreciated. Thanks! -Eric
Eric Pheifer
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Would the higher ups even know what you are talking about when you tell them the differences? I have noticed that people I have worked with in freelance do not know the difference at ALL! But, maybe I am just not working with the right people?
http://www.digitalputty.net
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I think you've laid out your case pretty well. You might just need to be more foreceful. Emphasize what isnt' possible with Mental Ray and how it will end up being more costly. The big reasons we switched were speed, quality of renderings, massive community and support base, and availability of very high quality training materials (Gnomon rendering with Vray Interiors and Exteriors).
Because of those factors, we were confident that we would be able to produce higher quality deliverable in shorter order and be able to overcome technical hurdles faster and easier than with Mental Ray (at the time, Mental Ray's documentation was poor at best and had a non-existent community. I dont' know if that's changed).
For us it really boiled down to the fact that there was a far better tool for our work than Mental Ray.
THOMAS SHANNON
SENIOR DESIGN VISUALIZATION SPECIALIST
PB Project Visualization
http://www.pbprojectviz.com/
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As for a demonstration, that's probably best done by yourself. Do you have any scenes that have given you fits in Mental Ray? If so, grab the free copy of Vray and see if you can't get it to render in there. It's going to be a learning experience if you aren't familiar with Vray, so I do suggest the Gnomon videos as they will give you a huge head start.
THOMAS SHANNON
SENIOR DESIGN VISUALIZATION SPECIALIST
PB Project Visualization
http://www.pbprojectviz.com/
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| Thanks for your input everyone. I have worked on a number of personal projects with a copy of VRay and I have been very satisfied with the VRay engine, the options, and the ease of producing realistic global illumination without too much rendering time. The learning curve is steep and I still have a ways to go to get better results with VRay, but I am finding it far easier than learning Mental Ray after a ton of hours spent using, researching, and reading tutorials for both engines. The community behind VRay seems to be much stronger than Mental Ray for AEC visualization. The free resources I have found for VRay training have been excellent and I imagine the training packages you pay for are even better. Training is a big concern for the company since they want to get others involved in visualization. So having access to a host of VRay training products is a big plus. The issue that I'm having is that we just finished our first in-house visualization and it looked pretty mediocre with my current Mental Ray skill (and I know I could have produced something better looking and faster in VRay). I believe that investing in VRay would be more cost-effective than putting in a ton of hours to get better with Mental Ray, which seems to have limited training resources anyways. But the company is saying "you just did a project with what we have, why do you need more software?" There is not really an understanding yet that more realistic visualizations (acheived with more experience, training, and various plug-ins) will likely be more impressive and informative for the client. Maybe I should try doing a quick scene with Mental Ray and VRay and compare the time it takes and the final rendered output. I'm not sure that just showing an example of a VRay project I have done and an example Mental Ray project will really get the point across. Thanks again for all your inputs.
Eric Pheifer
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Some other terms to toss around are "Industry Standard" and "Cutting Edge"
Most importantly, if Mental Ray is hindering your productivity or capabilities, it needs to be replaced.
Mental Ray has a very strong presence in special effects houses and higher-end production houses. This is because of the extremely customizeable shader architecture as well as the available SDK that allows ti to be customized to a great deal. Mental Ray directly competes with RenderMan and has been simplified by Autodesk but has never really caught on.
PS, you might want to do some research on the Mental Ray Proxy as I've heard that it doesn't work exactly as advertized
THOMAS SHANNON
SENIOR DESIGN VISUALIZATION SPECIALIST
PB Project Visualization
http://www.pbprojectviz.com/
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Great info! Thanks Tom. I had no idea where Mental Ray had a significant presence, mainly because I really haven't seen much about it on the net.
I have not been able to successfully use Mr Proxies because of system crashes when I go to render. They have been created and scattered ok, but when I go to render 3ds Max dies. I'm pretty sure that is a hardware resources thing but I'll look more into how they don't work as advertised. From what I have read, I was under the impression that Mr Proxies were working well in 3ds Max 2010.
If I continue to have problems with Mr Proxies, then that could be a good reason to get VRay AND upgraded hardware  !
Eric Pheifer
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"old dog"
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| Eric, It's tough trying to sell technology to upper management. It literally took us years to get where we are now with our systems, render farm, and software. Lukily we have people like Tom and Mark to take the technical jargan and boil it down to something the bean counters can understand. Usually it's a matter of work flow efficiency or cost savings, or both! In a few cases we had to plead that we would not meet the clients delivery date if we did not get the software/hardware needed. That always does the trick. Sometimes we had to compromise an certain things, but it worked out in the end. Hang in there!
Glen Loyd
Lead Design Visualization Specialist | Parsons Brinckerhoff
www.pbprojectviz.com
 
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"old dog"
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