V-RAY FOR SOFTIMAGE BETA - finaly here

[Memag]

V-RAY FOR SOFTIMAGE BETA PROGRAM

We are excited to announce our V-Ray for Softimage Beta Testing Program.
V-Ray for Softimage is the fifth product in the Chaos Group portfolio covering platforms from Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya to Rhino and SketchUp.
V-Ray for Softimage now supports all major Softimage features and comes with ICE support, animated parameters, strong render tree support, weightmaps and Sun & Sky functionality.

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[Lord Futzi Voldemort]

That is goooood!

Achim

[ace63]

Yup very good indeed - I have been testing VRay lately after a long break (Arnold got me!) and I have to say the implementation has come a long way. It is miles ahead from say a year ago.
Really good job by the chaos group guys.

[owei]

Great news! Congrats to Chaosgroup for the release of this public beta! Looking forward to the final product!

Best,
oliver

[McNistor]

Great news, thanks!

[Aumakua]

It was about time!

[Akurra]

Great news!

Yup very good indeed - I have been testing VRay lately after a long break (Arnold got me!) and I have to say the implementation has come a long way. It is miles ahead from say a year ago.
Really good job by the chaos group guys.

And... how does it compare to arnold?

[McNistor]

Great news!

Yup very good indeed - I have been testing VRay lately after a long break (Arnold got me!) and I have to say the implementation has come a long way. It is miles ahead from say a year ago.
Really good job by the chaos group guys.

And... how does it compare to arnold?

here we go again

[Akurra]

Great news!

Yup very good indeed - I have been testing VRay lately after a long break (Arnold got me!) and I have to say the implementation has come a long way. It is miles ahead from say a year ago.
Really good job by the chaos group guys.

And... how does it compare to arnold?

here we go again

;) Oh, come on, just a small question that originated from natural curiosity, I've never worked in arnold, but quite a lot in vray. It's interesting to hear some words from someone who just tried vray after long time of using arnold. It's not "do you think 3dsmax is better than si?"

[McNistor]

Nah, it's OK, don't worry. I'm sure someone will answer you, but the question weather other people's experiences is relevant enough for you still lingers on. The truth is you'll never truly know what suits you best from the two until YOU try them and as Arnie is inaccessible to mortals, I understand your curiosity. Actualy I'm just as curious as you are.

[azurecgi]

I think this is going to be a game-changer for Softimage!

I've been rendering large 3D Diesel engine model animations (1 million polys on average) in Lightwave due to the need for decent motion-blur in a decent amount of render time, and even then I've had to use the 'spinning light' trick to illuminate them.

I just rendered one of these engines in Softimage using the VRay Beta, lit with GI (Irradiance map - High animation - Primary and Brute Force - 8 subdivs 3 bounces - Secondary) and using good quality motion blur. With the engine filling a 1280x720 frame, it rendered in under 5 mins!!!

When trying this with Mental Ray before, I've had to give up due to 30-60 min / frame render times with pretty ropey motion-blur and splotchy GI.

WooHoo

[Akurra]

Nah, it's OK, don't worry. I'm sure someone will answer you, but the question weather other people's experiences is relevant enough for you still lingers on. The truth is you'll never truly know what suits you best from the two until YOU try them and as Arnie is inaccessible to mortals, I understand your curiosity. Actualy I'm just as curious as you are.

i know i know i know... i've been in 3d for 24 yrs and still keep asking stupid questions...

[IslandDreamer]

I'm new to the concept of changing renderers within Softimage. I've got Vray loaded, I assigned a material to an object and Vray is the selected scene shader. I assume I need to add a Vray environment or sky, but I'm not clear where I do that. Does Vray work with all standard XSI lights?

[ace63]

There is a bug with the current standard lights in newer Versions of Soft.
VRay comes with a few own lights found under Get -> Primitive -> Light.

For setting up an environment better look at the chaos group forums ;)

[Zafar Iqbal]

I've been doing some tests with a dense scene. Each walker consists of pretty much 5000 meshes at a total of 7 million triangles.

mental ray, 1h 55mins
Unified Sampling
- min 1
- max 6
- quality 0,9
- cutoff 0,005
Triangle filter @ 2
Brute force final gather @ 384 rays. 3 bounces.
1 real model and 9 instances.



VRay, 1h 35mins
Adaptice DMC
- min 1
- max 4
- threshold 0,005
Area filter @ 1,5
Brute force GI on prim and secondary with 44 subdivisions. 3 bounces
All walker models are VRMeshes



Both renderers started on actual rendering within 10 secs.

Tried to match the final quality. Close but not entirely there. Most prominent is the antialising quality. VRay is picking up more detail, however mr is doing a better job at picking up the "lego" logo on each knobs. ok ok, now I'm *really* pixel peeping

Converted renders from 32 to 8 bit and removed some yellowish tint from the VRay render - it was so gentle that you probably wouldn't be able to tell when comparing side by side (vs. ticking layers on/off in Photoshop). No other shopping was done.

[ActionArt]

Interesting. Have you tried not using "unified sampling" in MR? I've gotten nothing but bad results with it here (similar settings to what you're using). Sometimes it's brutally slow compared to the old method with comparable results. It seems to grind to a crawl in certain areas for no apparent reason. Just curious