the CAD render rama thread brought me into revisiting my skills.
As of now I am midlevel proficient in Rhino 5.0 and in anxient years used Cinema 4D for renders. That was time consuming.
These days time is my most valuable resource.
I downloaded a trial version of Vray, but I can’t find the most simple basics in there:
Where do I find materials in Vray? Is there no library?
Can you hint me to other forums, possibly, that may be specialized in this?
Can one find empty scenes for interior glam shots of design products somewhere?
Have you taken a look at the latests edition of Keyshot? Might be a bit easier to use. One of my designers preferred V ray for years but made the switch to Keyshot and now prefers it.
You should take a look at the official courseware on the Chaos group website. Just create an account and you get access to free video tutorials that cover almost every part of the interface and capabilities of V-ray. I taught myself V-ray Next for rhino over a couple of weeks and was able to make better renders than I ever could with any other rendering package (that’s probably because I never put in as much time and effort in other rendering packages). The main reason I like V-ray is because it works completely inside rhino and it’s just a lot more convenient. At the end of the day it probably just comes down to personal preference, I’ve seen excellent renders from all kinds of rendering packages.
I used VRay for Rhino from around 2010 until 2016-ish. This was back when you had to use a USB dongle in order for the license to work. Anyhow, although it doesn’t provide real-time viewing of your rendering, gotta admit the end results were better than what I’ve been able to do with Keyshot.
With that said, I’m still sticking with Keyshot since it’s so much quicker to get pretty good results. I can always learn more and improve the renderings, of course.
Takeaway is that I think Vray is superior but Keyshot is far easier to use.
With KeyShot it is obviously the best for just product shots on white/coloured backgrounds, but as soon as you want to have context like furniture etc. around and need to bring in models from other sources is it really still the easiest and quickest to use?
I also have used Keyshot at uni and as an intern. Which I liked a lot. I also have used maxwell for some time but found that time consuming to set up and to render. At work I used Solidworks Visualize which is quite nice but lacks features compared to keyshot.
But I recently switched to blender for a number of reasons. There are two plugins that support STEP import and Rhino 3dm import. And obviously it’s free. But more importantly the modeling is much quicker than using rhino or solidworks. And also the rendering works nice and quick enough for my taste. Only the specific Blender workflow takes some practice, learning to create materials etc. But there are many tutorials out there.
So currently I make a 3D sketch in Blender. Present it to the team, and after deciding on a certain design I switch to solidworks.
I can’t speak to pros and cons of Blender, but I got deep into VRay for Rhino a little over a decade ago and was very high on it for a while. Once you understand the science behind the myriad material and lighting properties you can get some incredibly lifelike results. That said, the trade off for VRay’s incredible depth and realism is a very slow workflow.
I eventually made the switch to Bunkspeed, which later spun off Keyshot. Keyshot, in my opinion, won’t normally get you to the insane level of realism as the VRays and Maxwells of the world. Its material properties lack depth, shadows are not cast realistically, and nuanced options like depth of field are basic at best. But Keyshot will get you 90% of the way there in a quarter of the time. The switch was a no-brainer for my day to day workflow. I about an hour of Keyshot work I can setup a scene, queue up a half dozen renders, and be perfectly happy with showing the results to a client. After an hour in VRay I would probably still be screwing with a single material’s specular values.
Bottom line: if you need to crank out next-to-photorealistic renders quickly and efficiently Keyshot is the way to go. If you’re looking for a single, immaculate image, and you have some time on your hands, VRay is one of the best.
Interesting. I’m sure many designers will be interested in adopting your workflow. That said if you become expertised in Solidworks I wonder how much faster Blender will be. And there are hardly any parametric controls. Also I always found box/mesh modeling environments like Max, Maya and Blender horribly non-intuitive UI-wise. I’m sure others will disagree. I was wondering if you could link to a tutorial/webinar that specifically and in-depth highlights all the possibilities and benefits of Blender for Industrial Design.