Will the Houdini team work with the Chaos Group to produce Vray for Houdini?

Or, the mantra render of Houdini is already very good to beat Vray?

- Ji

I had never used vray, am very interested in what pros and cons of vray compared to mantra. Would be a dream for vray to end up in Houdini in my opinion…

eitht.

I haven't had to deal with this issue yet, but I hear people complaining all the time about Vray's motion blur not matching Mantra's…

I've only used Vray in production, but I find Mantra to be more appealing to use…

Hello,

I might be a bit biased as I use Vray since it exists and Mantra just for some month

First of all. Someone seems to be working on it.
http://audenmedia.com/michael/?p=78 [audenmedia.com]
But I have no further info on this.

Why I would like to see Vray in Houdini is simply the speed.
For a large production studio with a huge renderfarm it might not make a
big difference using Mantra. But for smaller studios I think Vray would be
an advantage.
Raytracing and GI is from my perception something like 10 times faster.
Especially when doing interiors. I did this Houdini waterfall tutorial
where you just have the ground object and the waterfall.
Lit with just an environment light it took some minutes to get a decent
and clean result with Mantra. Especially with refractions I experienced
major slowdowns with Mantra (and I tried all the different modes with
different settings). You can render scenes like this within some
seconds in Vray.

Another thing I really like about Vray are the different GI engines you
can choose from depending on your needs. You may need a bit more
background knowledge compared to other renderes but if you know
what you´re doing it´s really powerfull. You can choose those engines
for primary and secondary GI pass wich makes it even more flexible.
You have a Brute force engine, the irradiance map (with various modes
for animations), the lightcache wich also has several modes like
progressive path tracing, quite new is the bidirectional path tracing and
last but not least photon mapping. Also glossy reflections can be rendered
by the lightcache wich significantly speeds up the process.

Regarding motion blur. I didn´t make a comparision but I never
thought it looked unrealistic.

I for my part really would like to see Vray for Houdini.
So we could start to skip that Autodesk crap

Thanks for sharing!

look forward to see how the vray for houdini may work…

netfrag-sam
Raytracing and GI is from my perception something like 10 times faster.
Especially when doing interiors. I did this Houdini waterfall tutorial
where you just have the ground object and the waterfall.
Lit with just an environment light it took some minutes to get a decent
and clean result with Mantra. Especially with refractions I experienced
major slowdowns with Mantra (and I tried all the different modes with
different settings). You can render scenes like this within some
seconds in Vray.

Maybe I'm just over-extrapolating from my extremely limited experience, but I ran into a problem where with refractions and reflections, I had a very simple scene taking 45 minutes/frame to render, and it turned out the problem was that by default in the Mantra Shader Builder node, displacement was being done even if the displacement is not used. It's apparently soon to be fixed, but disconnecting the displacement shading nodes inside the Mantra Shader Builder node got my scene down to 1 minute/frame. It might be worth checking if that problem's happening.

I got another bit of speedup on that scene by switching from regular raytracing to PBR and tweaking the settings so that it looks the same but with many fewer rays.