Just invested in VRAY for Houdini and it seems very very flaky. Barely gotten it to work on Linux and on Mac. Looses camera params when going from IPR to production, crashes and locks up easily. Reports issues in their own nodes on startup. Been through debugging hell with this and assumed it was my fault all the time but as times passes on, I get the feeling that the integration with H basically sucks and cannot be used for production. Sad, cause I would really need it to work for a project where my collaborator is using (and an expert on) VRAY for 3DS. I am just looking for other peoples experiences here. Is it usable? Also, it really needs to work fine with PDG! Or is it only Redshift(great experience in actually production!) and 3Delight(just tested but great experiences while testing) I can actually rely on as plugin renderers for H? Please tell me it works for someone, and if so, what system you have been using. Thanks!
haha dude! I had to reply to this. YES! I have been trying to give Vray 6 a chance for a month with my 30 day trial. It is THE worst renderer I have ever attempted to use. The new "ocean" integration sucks. Normal map and bump map workflow is ???? You can't rotate the dome light around in the y, but x and z will flip it all over the place. I wasn't even allowed to post on the forums for help even though I was logged in and registered, probably because I was on a trial and didn't pay, I'm glad I didn't pay for that garbage. I agree with you 100%. If I have to search google and forums to figure out why my normal map looks funky and why I cant rotate an env light you lose my interest. It had a lot of cool looking features like the proc clouds and stuff but I'm done with it!
It's interesting to hear everyone's thoughts! I had just been tasked with assessing Vray as a potential render engine for our studio.
First reactions have not been good.
They don't provide a watermarked trial version. This is absolutely crazy. No-one can assess whether a render engine is worth investing in with just a 1 month trial. Arnold (for example) you can keep using with a watermark. Allowing time to R&D and make a decision.
Like theshizon just mentioned, I too have now realized that I can't even post on the forums to ask questions and get user or vray support. This is completely unacceptable.
We had to modify they're own files so that it even works with Houdini Solaris while other render engines are loaded.
Some brief interaction with customer service has been a horrible experience.
Based on the Vray forums they have 49 topics (at time of writing) on Solaris/USD. This doesn't bode well for Vray integration with so little user interaction.
Time to first pixel and some IPR responsiveness in some quick initial testing is yielding worse results that both Arnold and Karma.
I'm so surprised by all this, don't they want customers? I thought this was a top-tier render engine used by many high end VFX studios.
I've been using vray for Houdini for a few months, since it offers a few very minor features that are a little bit easier to implement than in redshift or karma or 3delight, for example. Granted I am not a rendering wizard and the scenes I am working with can be pretty simple. I have for the most part been impressed with the implementation. There are definitely some funny aspects to the plugin, and a few undeveloped areas so I understand avoiding it in production for now. But I also think the parts that work are pretty clear, and they are doing a good job of maintaining their image of having a very polished user experience without sacrificing features. I hope they continue in this direction, and I think that the Houdini plugin has a lot of potential, if they can address some of your basic feature complaints. They should be able to do that, considering everything that have done to get the plugin working as well as it does.
I also opened a support ticket with them about a crash that they fixed in a few days in one of their nightly builds, which are more or less necessary to install to have a proper experience with the program.
V-Ray has its quirks, same as any other complex plugin that runs inside a complex piece of software such as houdini but it is one of the industry standard renderers (if not THE industry standard) for film and vfx so it's hard to dislodge, as much as I tried moving away from it, on this occasion I couldn't.
Will try again at some point in future when other renderers have matured a bit more.
As V-Ray users what we should do is get some Chaos Group member of tech support staff to come on this forum to assist us (like they do for Rhino), what we need is to ask more and more questions on this forum as opposed to the Chaos Group forum. This makes total sense since we're using V-Ray as a plugin inside Houdini not the other way around.
