mental ray or vray?

[garys123]

I would just like to ask which render you would choose if you have got the option vray or mental ray? (Take the money out of the equation)The reason i ask is that i have been looking at vray but it does look pretty complicated to use and there does not seem to be to many tutorials. There does seem to be a few books on the subject so if vray is that much better i would get some of these books.

[NinthJake]

Well MR is free and implemented in the later versions of Max and Maya (not sure about versions before 2010) so getting Vray would give you the option to choose any of them.

It also depends on what you are making. If you want to make photorealistic renders Vray would be the best choice (not saying Mental ray can't produce photoreal renders but in that case Vray is faster)

If you want to render low-poly presentations or kind of "CG-look" characters then MR is better (in my opinion)

I would also recommend Octane render (http://www.refractivesoftware.com/) for photorealistic renders where you have a lot of polygons. It's an unbiased ray-tracing renderer which is using the GPU to render in real-time.

[Kage]

Vray is worth learning. It really does not take that much effort to get nice results at all, and it can achieve photo realistic results.
Mental Ray to me is a lot more complex to grasp.

[paulius-st]

well v-ray is faster than MR and can offer allmost the same qualitie. and v-ray is easyer and simplyer to vork with. MR is a very complicated renderer vith lots more option than v-ray but they are allmost useless. statistics talk for them self - most vfx companies use v-ray cause time is money, and v-ray saves lots of time there for making more money.

[Crispy4004]

well v-ray is faster than MR and can offer allmost the same qualitie. and v-ray is easyer and simplyer to vork with.... - most vfx companies use v-ray cause time is money, and v-ray saves lots of time there for making more money.

Well, that's when you don't consider the community tools available for both and any in-house developed tools for MR. One of the great equalizers for instance is sIBL which dramatically improves the quality, render speed, and ease of use with HDRIs for both rendering engines. It's true that depending on your 3D application MR may need some community tools to get around certain issues and speed up the workflow, but the question is are those big enough inconveniences to spend money on a simplified yet nearly identical rendering engine?

Also there are lots of VFX studios using Mental Ray, Vray does have a good presence, but let not forget about Renderman either.

[garys123]

Some intresting comments thanks. I never knew that vray was quicker than mental ray. But at first look of both of them i would say that mental ray is more easy to use out of the box that is just my opinion though. When i get paid next i will get some of the vray tutorial books.