VRay vs MR: Blur point of view

[cecofuli]

HI all,

this is a spectacular thread, from ZBrush. There are most of artist directly by Blur.

LINK


there are a lot of information, but my attention is for this thread.

LINK

[...]Like I said the skin shader was a big one, and equally important was the A&D material, that allows you to do almost everything else. We don't have separate modeling and texture departments, so it's very important for us dumb artists that the materials are not only powerful but also easy to setup. The way those mr mats are laid out makes immediate sense and give out spectacular results fairly quickly. From my standpoint that was the main reason mental ray made the modelers happy, they could render out beautiful sample stills themselves almost immediately.
I won't compare Vray vs mental ray, but they're both production proven renderers with very comparable features. If you like one better than the other then by all means use that one. At the end of the day it's all in the artists' eyes, and you should use whatever tool you're comfortable with.[...]

[vlado]

While I do agree on the point of skin shading, I am a bit puzzled by the comments about material setup, if you consider how close all renderers are in that department nowadays...

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morbid Angel]

While I do agree on the point of skin shading, I am a bit puzzled by the comments about material setup, if you consider how close all renderers are in that department nowadays...

Best regards,
Vlado

the new A&D materials are the one supposidly "mesured" physically accurate presetup materials that ship with max 2009. They are preset materials for simple things like, plastics, metals, glass etc.

Quite honestly, and I don't mean to badmouth blur, or anyone who works there, but the quality of that last cinematic was below the usual blur class in my opinion. And the rendered models shown there, did not impress me. At the end of the day, you still need a pro texture/shader artist to do the work on materials and a pro lighting artist to final the look. Presetup materials can only get you so far.

[vlado]

Hm, the post did not mention the Pro materials, just the Arch & design material, which on its own is not based on measured anything. It's not quite physically accurate either, especially in its treatment of hilights and glossy reflections (which property is directly transferred to the Pro materials too).

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morbid Angel]

ah my mistake...

[Seraph135]

Blur uses the Arch & Design shader and the skin+ shader pretty much exclusively now. From my point of view the studio switched to MR mainly because of the skin shader. There was a lot of discussions about what renderer to use and in the end MR prevailed. That said, Blur uses many different renderers including Vray from time to time. Usually the motivation is that one renderer can give you a certain type of render pass faster than another. In production it makes sense to use the best tool for the job and Blur is cool like that. Vray has been used on a number of projects at Blur not only for certain passes but also for entire projects as well as specific shots.

Tim J

[JeffG2]

Vlado,

I've been pulling my hair out (for months) trying to get a decent human skin out of the vray SSS.

A while back you mentioned a solution on the horizon (Vray utilizing MRfastskin?)

If I may ask, what's the plan and what's the time frame?

Thanks

[vlado]

V-Ray cannot of course use any mental ray shaders; however, we are working on an interface for easy set up of skin materials for V-Ray.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Undersky]

V-Ray cannot of course use any mental ray shaders; however, we are working on an interface for easy set up of skin materials for V-Ray.

Best regards,
Vlado

That sounds great. However, would that be the glossy-refraction-with-fog-and-GI-approach? Although it's good, it would be nice to have a shader that works without GI turned on. I know about the fast sss shader, but I've yet to see some good skin renders with it. It works good for glacier ice and other harder materials, but for softer ones like skins or more cartoony materials it just doesn't cut it (please prove me wrong). I would very much like to see a shader like Brazil's SSS shader (with support for blocking geometry) or mental rays fast sss, and preferably integrated directly into the usual "PowerShader" instead of having to go through VrayBlendMtl.

[vlado]

However, would that be the glossy-refraction-with-fog-and-GI-approach?

Nope; it uses a faster interpolative method based on modified VRayFastSSS (btw, you can use the glass fog without GI).

I know about the fast sss shader, but I've yet to see some good skin renders with it. It works good for glacier ice and other harder materials, but for softer ones like skins or more cartoony materials it just doesn't cut it (please prove me wrong).

Which is why we are working on it. Actually it works not too bad, but it would be more convenient for the users to have one single material, rather than assembling the pieces manually.

Best regards,
Vlado

[JeffG2]

V-Ray cannot of course use any mental ray shaders; however, we are working on an interface for easy set up of skin materials for V-Ray.

Any idea when it might get rolled out?

[rmejia]

MR arch+design materials have that nice drop down template menu for:
- Appearance and attributes
- Finishes
- Transparent Materials
- Metals
- Advanced tools

Which are some nice presets to have to get started and modify from there (even though they may not be perfect; it's still a good idea). It's definately easier than starting from scratch with the same set of variables to make any material and also dumbs down the material making process in a helpful way

I know there are 3rd party add-ons and material sites for VRay (which are great by the way), but I think it would still be nice to have some preset templates included with the program as well, to guide one initially when trying to start out on the material making process. Material creation is definately one of the most important things to learn and can be overwhelming at first due to the sheer number of variable parameter configuration possibilities. (from an architects point of view )

[simmsimaging]

I'm all for simplifying materials quite a bit. I understand that a lot of the bells and whistles are there for more advanced users to optimize, but having worked for a while with mats in programs like Fry and Maxwell I have really come to prefer that simple approach. It's still very powerful and mats are very quickly built and adapted.

The A&D presets do offer more of a two-tier approach to the interface, which helps bridge that gap but the VrayMat offers all the same essential functionality as far as I can tell.

b

[joconnell]

Yep - I think that the vray material is largely very easy to use with the only exception of fog / translucency, that the standard / raytrace / brazil / mental ray materials are a bit handier to tweak due to breaking realism - I've no real problems with the vray mats myself but I can see exactly where being able to add a tiny bit of spec / self illumination or whatever is handy for the artist.

[gagui]

Fake specular and glossines, and selfillumination are the problem with vray material. I kown there are ways to emulate it but not so easy like MR or Standard shader.

If vray material could have specular and glossines, independent from reflection, and selfillumination parameters...