Any point in rendering in Arnold or V-ray instead of Iray?

[Ender011]

I recently got a student edition of Autodesk Maya that comes with the Arnold render engine built in. I had planned to just create animations in Maya using a Genesis 8 figure, transfer them back to Daz and save them as a preset.

However! I recently read somewhere that both Arnold and VRay (which I could also get a student edition of) are both better than Iray. I'm still pretty new to rendering, but after doing a few tests I didn't see much of a difference. There is a solid chance that I'm just messing something up with Arnold and it's keeping me from getting better results.

So, is there any real benefit to switching? Aside from dealing with the head ache of getting all of the materials transferred over to Arnold, that is ... Would I really see any better results after going through the extra work?

 

[anne O'nymous]

So, is there any real benefit to switching?

Short answer: Yes, but no.

Long answer:
While IRay rendering engine is far to be as bad as some say, Maya's rendering engines are better, so technically speaking, you would benefit from their use. But there's two "but".
Firstly, to effectively benefit from them, I mean in a way that you would notice the difference, you would need to tweak all the material of you imported Daz assets, and understand how to correctly configure Maya's engine to give the best results.
Secondly, while you'll be proud of yourself and would have the satisfaction to provide the best rendering quality you can achieve, less than 1% of your players would notice this quality. When you see that there's games with inconsistent renders, or characters that looks like plastic dolls, that are praised by their fans for their supposed "high quality renders", you wonder if it worth the time.

Personally, in your shoes I would stick to IRay for the rendering. Doing so would already teach you a lot about all the secondary part of a good rendering (lighting, posing, even material tweaking). And doing it with Daz would mean that you learn in a familiar environment designed for people with average knowledge.
But I would also keep Maya near, for later, when I would understand all the mechanisms and feel ready to pass to something more professional.

 

[DaCreat0r]

Yeah, any quality you gain and/or any time you save will quickly be negated by the amount of work it is to convert each and every material properly. Especially with geoshells. Getting those right and seamless can be a huge pain in the rear.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

I recently read somewhere that both Arnold and VRay (which I could also get a student edition of) are both better than Iray.

In what technical aspect exactly?
Biases between ray tracing engine are quite meaningless for the most part imo.

Maybe one could argue about caustic (and Iray is not really bad at it)? Radius based SSS (Iray) vs old school 3-layers one (Vray alShader)? Even Cycle/Octane lack of Dual Lobe doesn't really matter since you can cook one on the fly.

Here the thing tho, that barely ever change :

1. Best engines are the ones you are most comfortable with.
2. Quality materials (good sculted mesh, and good textures materials)
= It's already 80% of your render, whatever engine you choose.