How can you compare a vue render with a mental ray render
without having Vue?
I didnât, specifically. I answered a guyâs question about why Mental Ray was popular.
How can you speak disparagingly about a program if you donât have it?
I didnât. It mentioned that it didnât look too bad, but it doesnât have the level of control available that Mental Ray allows. I can tell this alone by looking at the âadvancedâ rendering options as spoken about on the Vue webpage.
How can you advise anyone to buy or not buy it?
I donât remember doing this⊠I said that people should buy into whatever program gives them the results they want to see. Perhaps you should go back and read through what I wrote.
Is it not possible that Vue, although not a 'Renderer" could possibly have something that Mental Ray does not?
Vue renders pretty much the same way Mental Ray does. Both are ârenderersâ. However, if you want, you can program shaders and tweak values on a very deep level in MR. You canât do this in Vue, to my knowledge. That doesnât mean Vue is useless however. Vue has a number of quick-render options that look quite powerful⊠and Iâm tempted to download the demo and have a look. The thing is, and as I mentioned before, someone asked about Mental Ray (they were having problems because of some reason or another), and I answered.
Thereâs a reason books have been written on Mental Ray, and not on a Vue renderer. Mental Ray has been around for a very, very long time, and itâs about as flexible as a renderer can get. Besides⊠itâs not about what feature one program does or doesnât have. When youâre talking about hours and hours of rendering time, itâs often about getting the most out of the program youâre using.
Lastly, I donât believe people know what theyâre doing with Mental Ray. I loaded a Poser 5 character into XSI, increased his polycount by about four times, and rendered him with HDRI lighting. It took 30 seconds, on my fairly low-end Athlon 2800. And, I didnât tweak a single thing. You apparently âtweakedâ Maya, and wound up with a 20 minute render. I still donât know how thatâs possible, considering Poserâs Firefly renderer can do a character of that complexity in a minute or so.
With that in mind, do you think you should be comparing Maya to Vue at all?