How can you compare a vue render with a mental ray render
without having Vue?
I didn’t, specifically. I answered a guy’s question about why Mental Ray was popular.
How can you speak disparagingly about a program if you don’t have it?
I didn’t. It mentioned that it didn’t look too bad, but it doesn’t have the level of control available that Mental Ray allows. I can tell this alone by looking at the ‘advanced’ rendering options as spoken about on the Vue webpage.
How can you advise anyone to buy or not buy it?
I don’t 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 ‘renderers’. However, if you want, you can program shaders and tweak values on a very deep level in MR. You can’t do this in Vue, to my knowledge. That doesn’t mean Vue is useless however. Vue has a number of quick-render options that look quite powerful… and I’m 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.
There’s 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 it’s about as flexible as a renderer can get. Besides… it’s not about what feature one program does or doesn’t have. When you’re talking about hours and hours of rendering time, it’s often about getting the most out of the program you’re using.
Lastly, I don’t believe people know what they’re 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 didn’t tweak a single thing. You apparently ‘tweaked’ Maya, and wound up with a 20 minute render. I still don’t know how that’s possible, considering Poser’s 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?