Grant Warwick about Bias and Differences of 3D Rendering Engines

Grant Warwick's Mastering VRay:

[rpdacosta]

I always love seeing comparisons between engines.
I realy like vray, but also octane and arnold.

* However, maybe the better comparisson would be between vray and redshift (GPU + also Biased), I have yet to see any Vray render being faster then Redshift.

* And another thing is that most pro's used highend computers build for CPU engines for years (like 3000 dollars double Xeons). For that same price you would have 7 GTX 1070 cards. (that's 13000+ CUDA render cores) I often see GPU pro's with dedicated GPU machines with up tp 4 GPUs built in, rarely less that 3. Comparing CPU rendering with little less powerfull GPUS is weird to me because rendertimes with GPU engines are not linear, they start fast and get slower towards the end.

* What i don't agree with is the arnold comparisson. Arnold is being used in most big studios. It is not because they don't know how to use vray or don't own vray. It's not as black and white as simply being simpler rendersettings. The big difference is that Arnold is more optimised for animations with everything turned on DOF, Motion Blur and high memory consuming scenes. (specially when they are rendered in renderfarms with less powerfull machines than the artists machine) Even the largest scene from Guardians of the Galaxy, the complete city scene with ten thousands of 3D lights in it, was rendered with machines with only 24 gigs of memory. Most big studios did not switch to arnold because of the hype. They also did comparisosns before switching hundreds or artists licences.

[Deepth]

As a matter of fact, i can tell the difference between an unbiased render and a biased render. If I was there, I would ask you to not show me those pictures before you found both of them (vray / octane) so i could guess 100% which one is which.

Look wise, unbiased renderer give you instant good results without tweaking that much. You may have more control over Vray, but it's simply more control that is there for the artist to achieve the result of what an unbiased rendering can offer very simply.

To me, it's like someone has a book binding machine, and someone else tells them that it's not that interesting, and you better have to staple the pages one by one, because it gives more control over each page.

Vray is very good for freelance artists, because you can tweak your scene to reduce your render time very drastically. So your computer and your client are pleased. However, in production, the time you pass on scene optimization is a precious time you could put into another shot and when it's good enough you just send that to the farm.

[fluidfox]

Thank you this provided a lot of insight

[vadimtaranov]

Every engine has its own area to work with. Even old Corona beats the hell out of vray when it comes to detailed micro shots of a glowing tube amplifier where light passes through glass and other obstacles .vray still has lots of noise with very long render times in this case. but vray is definitely faster than corona, maxwell, even mental ray in the scenes like you have.

[xpez]

whats interesting is that everthing got simplified in Vray. But now Redshift has kind of stole the limelight and it has kept the custimization that Vray had with the putting specific samples amounts in the lights and textures.. or allowing you to override everything in the render manager. the philosophy of how much control vs allowing the renderer to take care of it has been changing amongst the render engine developers..

[SonGoku-dmgr]

the audio is pain in the ear.. especially when there is "s"..

[XTheDentist]

Something like Keyshot is great for concept artists just trying to get a nice feel for their designs quickly. I dont know too much about production rendering but is there a difference in terms of power & control between renderers? Like for example, 3ds Max and Wings 3D can both do modeling but we know Max is more powerful because there are many more settings, tools & options available. I watched one of Grants sample lessons on Vray & it was great seeing how he builds up the materials & all the subtleties involved in achieving realism. Now, my question is do you lose some of this power & granular control over the different fine tuning of the layers of the image by choosing a renderer thats a bit simpler to work with than Vray? Because if thats true than theres really no discussion here if you cant get to the results you need because some important internal stuff is tucked away in a black box for the sake of simplicity.

[jamesdickerson]

I have to say, the Octane render, compared to the VRay render, was far better. He's sitting there trying to convince us of something we can plainly see with our own eyes. The Octane render was better. Get over it. I don't think you really understand bias.

[gnightrow]

if you take away the features and the speed of Vray I feal like there is not much difference between mental ray, I have seen so many comparison images and I can hardly tell the difference. the reason why I am saying this is that someone is willing to spend money on vray just to win a competition and I don't think it is fair.

[PetarStamenkovic]

I heard Octane is fast, maybe as fast as Redshift. I _know_ vray is very slow... So how come vray is faster than Octane? Is vray rt that much better than vray?

[JorgeIvanovich]

Biased video, Arnold eats lots of geo.

[JezUK]

I had to stop listening to the swearing (not cool) and the biased opinions - if people reckoned the Octane image was better, then that's that. They said it, and you still didn't accept it, so you're the biased ones.

If you really wanted to test - just don't tell anyone what image was made by what renderer and then see.

[thom]

Biased V-Ray instructor/fanboy begging ppl to come back from octane... LOL.