I can´t comment on renderman compliant renderers but have some production experience with VRay and Arnold as a Lighter.
There is a freelance special for VRay (valid until 15.0.2013) currently. http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/german_promos.html Don´t know if this is restricted to Europe or even Germany. -- While you will need to buy seperate plug-ins for Maya, 3dsMax and Softimage when using VRay, Arnold gives you both SiToA and MtoA, e.g. you can use your Arnold license to run out of Maya and Softimage. Arnold is still beta, the pricing, package bundling and licensing is not publically available to look up and compare with alternative options. -- My personal experience with VRay leads me to trust it as an easy to use renderer that has benefitted from being forced to overcome many of 3dsMax´s shortcomings and limitations, like a lack of a renderpass system by implementing a great many options to break out renderelements like MatteID, GI or Lightselect framebuffers. One can use VRay´s options to AA and filter samples just as globally as one would set specific sampling settings in Arnold, it´s actually very easy to just use the noise threshold in Vray to balance quality against speed, while Arnold sometimes may require a more thorough understanding of which kind of sampling needs an adjustment. -- In terms of tutorials, 10+ years of archviz, commercials and feature film production usage shows, VRay has more youtube and google results but Arnold gains momentum quickly, especially since it has been added to the www.fxphd.com courses, which come with a license for training and a forum that may answer the questions that come with the first steps better than the beta list, which is more populated by folks with a long standing production backround. -- If asked to make a purchase decision now, I would most likely opt for VRay, especially when facing budget restrictions in the form of not having the headroom for a TD dedicated to making the renderfarm eat Arnold files artist friendly and bolt rendermanagement, naming conventions as well as texture format and asset management systems in place to work conveniently with large datasets and multiple shots or sequences that may require more than just common sense. The benefit I would see would be support for FumeFx, e.g. rendering smoke and the likes easily and the availability of a large group of Junior/Mid/Senior shading&lighting artists capable of using VRay in at least one of the three of the supported packages. If forced to work stripped to the bone, VRay may proove to be the better club/bat to swing initially, even though both Arnold and VRay are capable of precise cuts when in the right hands, using Arnold as a mace may quickly become more costly, imo. Cheers, tim On 28.12.2012 07:03, Andy Moorer wrote:
Hi gang, happy holidays. I would be interested in hearing from people regarding rendering solutions for Softimage, particularly anyone who can objectively compare Arnold, 3delight and Vray. I've heard from various people advocating/evangelizing each, but what I am really after is a fair and unbiased comparison of the three, where they are particularly strong etc. Any takers? Not interested in a flame war, just trying to grasp the differences between them, and perusing feature lists doesn't help much - opinions from anyone who has had opportunity to work with them directly would be invaluable. Being mostly a particle/rigging type I don't have the insight some of you closer to the lighting side of things probably have.
