Vray is an industry standard, there´s no arguing, and if you want Blender to use it, either the community and/or the BF has to ensure it does.

If BDancer ever chooses to discontinue the Blender plugin, you stand there with an unusable vray, if the BF maintains the plugin, or finances Andrey to do so. Sure they can make a Blender integration, but who´s going to buy vray for Blender for a 4 digit price? Well maybe not 4 digits, the Sketchup integration costs around 800 Euro.

The price difference is mostly made by the 3DS or Maya integration. I guess you also don´t know that vray is in the 4 digit pricerange, and CS released the Standalone for 350 Euro pretty much just so it can be used for Blender and other stuff, where communities create exporters. I guess you don´t know that Andrey is a independent dev doing it all for free and it would make life a lot more easy if he had someone to lay out the Blender API to him? Soley to polarize: Why using devtime from the BF to add features most users don´t use, or can´t handle, while there are needs for “professional” users where the devtime is actually generating real money for the users and that puts Blender in a place for commercial competition? Blender has limited dev time, why pull from it to support something that most users can’t afford? If VRay wants to tap the Blender user market then they can make an exporter. But one can always work around that and if I need an engine to chew trough three layers of glossy glass then I know VRay will save my ass.īoo. Just an example: Procedurals are supporter, IR isn’t, network rendering is not really there yet I think, no dome light I think, stuff like that. There hasn’t been movement in the project for quite some time, maybe that will change with Cycles infrastructure being in trunk now.

You have to realise the exporter is oss, so it is what it is and it may very well stay like it is now forever. If you are of the type that always thinks he needs the latest feature to even start working on something (I know I am/was guilty of that) then you probably won’t be happy. If you need a good quality production renderer for animations without all the bells and whistles (which VRay has but aren’t exposed) then go for it. But everything I personally need is there.

I would say you get the basics of VRay, fast GI, excellent image quality, filtering, antialiasing… The integration is robust and production ready but doesn’t cover all of the advanced features.

Download vray for blender free