in my experience, Arnold has the best quality and is a bit easier to set up, but man, it's SLOW, it's not suitable for small companies or students with hardware and time/budget limitations, only for bigger companies with big farms available.
Easier to set up - ? You still have to set all the sampling levels for the render settings, lights and shaders - vray does all that for you with Unified Sampling, and does a better job than the user can ; more efficient and faster rendering. Also leaving the GI on Brute Force could not be any simpler ; so the only complexity is when you use interpolated GI or Light Cache, which haul ass, and Arnold does not even offer.
@@schmoborama don't get me wrong, I use mainly vray and it's my favorite, unified sampling really helped to make it easier to use. Maybe too much, because you can't differentiate between specular sampling and gi sampling, etc. In that regard Arnold gives you that control in a single section, whereas in vray you have to go to each shader if you activate local sampling. I don't remember seeing local samples for each shader in Arnold. Each light has its own sampling value, that's true.
@@martindione386 "Maybe too much, because you can't differentiate between specular sampling and gi sampling" but again, vray is doing that for you and better than you could do - "Arnold gives you that control in a single section, whereas in vray you have to go to each shader if you activate local sampling" What I'm hearing is that Vray gives you too much control, but Arnold is better in places where it gives you more control... Why is the ability to adjust separate channel's samples globally, an asset, but the ability to adjust samples per-shader, is not? Easy enough to link them together too. I get it, everyone assumes that there must be a good reason that some people prefer Arnold ( I'm in the industry and I haven't found one ), and prefer to stay positive about it - but then a lot of ppl end up believing that the Emperor's new clothes are wonderful
@@mcan-piano4718 No, just the ones made at Sony, before he went over to the Marvel universe - Sony owns their own version of Arnold. And it was Slow & Noisy on those shows, but it didn't matter b/c Sony had at 18,000 cpu cores back then.
@@SanOcelotl they just say that, b/c they have no real reason for prefering arnold, which is ridiculously slow. using something as subjective as image quality then saying "can't you see it?" is a cheap & easy trick.
In 3dsmax Is there a library of materials for Arnold in the same way that V-Ray has a material library? The Physical Materials presets are very limited, and V-Ray has a lot. I have not been able to find 3dsMax Arnold Material Libararies.
Arnold is much faster and minimal parameters on controlling noises especially on animated render. Most and important Arnold if already built-in in 3ds max. Vray is expensive.
I just started with Arnold and man it's very slow, even on CPU, rendering a teapot with one light and a simple infinite background. Default settings took 6 minutes to render on a Ryzen 3700x. But it looks sooo Good.
His definition of instantly is interesting lol I have a 3090ti thread ripper 32core and Arnold is still slow but damnn it def loooks so goooood. no matter what I do it’s still slow. Gpu render does seem a little faster now as long as any .tx are there and gpu is populated but sometimes it’s dog shit slow lol
Great video - there's an inaccuracy in the pricing information. You're comparing Vray's monthly subscription (80$) vs Arnold annual subscription on a monthly cost. For a single application, Vray comes down to 470$ per year or 39$ per month. This gives the impression that Vray is an expensive solution, a widely shared feeling in the industry (I used to believe that until I checked it back a few months earlier when switching back from Corona). Cheers
@@JasonAdank VRAY is expensive for Indies 80$ plus tax is overkill whereas Arnold comes for free with 3Ds Max and Maya so yes Arnold is best in this case. only downside I see is the availability of the Material Lib with at least 100+mats used commonly will make it more practical and yes, if Evermotion makes Arnold ready assets it will be icing on the cake. IMHO Arnold is affordable and user friendly unless Vray makes and an Indie and cuts down costs to 40$ incl Tax
@@martindione386 lol 😂 are you kidding me?? Who told you this ?? It is a big lie Some one must have pranked on you as there is a ☑️ box in render settings show watermark if you uncheck it it wont show up It is turned off by default Also there’s no need for an additional license to use Arnold within max and maya both indie ans non indie licenses so that answers your concern ( no watermark is visible on renders )
@@xanzuls I am unbiased. One is better, one is worse. I've used both, extensively, for years. Did you think that everything is equal? Not only is arnold clearly and significantly slower to render, they also constantly screw up. The only kind of lights that you can add a texture to, are the dome, the spot, mesh, and the area light... but *only if it's square* area light. No disc light texture, nor cylinder light, nor point/sphere. How basic is that? For Solaris, which has been out more than a year, the arnold geniuses broke Adaptive Sampling. You just can't use it. I've got a huge laundry list of more of these basic necessities that they just screwed up or haven't fixed for years.
@Kalashnikov oh please, I've had enough of the edgelord shit. Tell us again how "limited use" is good enough for Avenger's End Game and other major motion pictures, arrogant fool guess what, faster still means FASTER. Not-noisier-than-shit is also nice. But yea since total fucking Nerds prefer to set render properties with Expressions and Code, Arnold is right up their alley - it's perfectly designed for ppl who don't give a shit about render times *or* maximum quality
As much as I enjoy your videos I must disagree heavily with this assessment. Having used both, Arnold doesn't even come close to being as user-friendly as Vray. If you need to use GPU rendering for speed and use plugin software like Forest Pack, Vray is the way to go. I keep running into problems with Arnold in this respect. I've also experienced Arnold rendering like a slug. Others have done side-by-side renders with Arnold, Vray, Octane, etc. Arnold always rendered significantly slower than others. I was excited to start using Arnold because the results are good. But I still hate using it. I want to line up the developers and kick each one of them in the junk ever time I use Arnold. I use Arnold every day for work. Vray is still the better program.
Yeah V-Ray is super user friendly and has lots of tools or effects that are well done and well optimized. Interactivity is insanely fast and geo/mat optimization is good. Arnold is also very great but the only problem it's very slow and not only in rendering for example if I drop Skydome without HDRI map and render cube primitive without material applied my viewport fps drops from 350~ to 5-15fps ( while not even rendering with GPU ), also there's delays when selecting or moving stuff while using IPR ( Arnold RenderView ), now simply imagine larger scene with HDRI, materials and so on, you basically have to pause the IPR before you click on anything or move anything if you want it go smooth. Since it's fully "Unbiased" I think the 20x slower render speed than V-Ray is kinda acceptable. It would be insane engine if they implemented some "biased" calculation methods such as Irradiance Point Cloud just like Redshift offers which is basically GPU version of Arnold ( not related but nearly everything is a "copy", even the unbiased Brute Force renders about as slow as Arnold GPU but the Irradiance Point Cloud makes it one of the fastest GPU renderers ).
arnold is definitely slower - often a LOT slower - only 1 studio I worked with it would use any raytrace reflections because of how slow it was overall. I just finished a comparison test btwn the two with only diffuse, raytraced shadows and fast motion, and vray was 5 times faster. With reflections and GI though, the difference was staggering ; Vray, 1min. 37sec. Arnold, 3... HOURS. And that was after very careful and comprehensive testing of Arnold's render settings, to find the best setup.
@@schmoborama In my case when I did some testing V-Ray rendered low light diffuse interior scene in around 40sec while Arnold took 24mins using Adaptive Sampling @ 0.01 ( which is the best possible optimization in terms of render settings, I think playing with Samples and disabling adaptive is only worth it when the scene has lots of various materials/surfaces but even then it won't be far from adaptive in terms of speed as it will basically stop rendering based on the noise value separately for each category anyway ). For a consumer grade systems Arnold is simply not worth it, you need a Workstation or a Workstation dual CPU so you can sacrifice half of the threads for the UI performance + render fairly fast or Multi-GPU ( NVLink ) setup so most of the stuff you're rendering becomes fast enough so it doesn't matter that much e.g. if you can render a still frame in 1min and same scene using vray in 3-15sec then it's not a huge difference unless for animation. But not on average system when it's like 10min Vray vs 3hours Arnold with exact same looking result... Arnold still can be useful on average systems for very large scale scenes tho as it seems to optimize memory usage better and has "Kick" which lets you render outside of 3D software reducing even more memory usage.
@@ExacoMvm Something to keep in mind with Arnold's Adaptive sampling is that just checking it on has a huge overhead, it takes a long time for Arnold to calculate edges and aliasing. So, very often, 2 samples with 10 max samples will render significantly slower than 10 camera samples with adaptive turned off. While adaptive would always be the fastest in any other renderer. So you need a high threshold in Arnold's adaptive ( 0.02 or higher, which is higher than the default ) to make up for that overhead and get any speed increase... which often allows too much noise. And yea while it is nice to have separate samples for diffuse / spec. etc., all too often increasing by 1 sample will double the number of rays and be more than you need - leaving you with a choice of too noisy or to slow, with nothing in between. But Vray's Unified sampling does all of that for you. That's why Arnold's lights have a Sampling value, and Vray's don't. I wonder why no one mentions that Arnold never bothered with unified sampling and still makes the user set sample levels in all the lights and shaders.
@@schmoborama That's interesting, thanks! I've played around a bit testing "Normal" vs "Adaptive" and the non-adaptive way is faster, at least for a smaller low sample scene. Camera ( AA ): 3 Adaptive: 12 ( 0.01 ) Time: 12m28s Camera ( AA ): 12 Adaptive: Off Time: 11m55sec No visible noise difference, while this is interesting I think it's because even Adaptive is off it's still somewhat adaptive, because if you have different values on Diffuse, Spec etc there's still sample range, it doesn't brute force lets say 1024 samples on each pixel like Vray, Cycles or many other renderers would do with adaptive off so lets say if you're in a situation where you have exterior scene with a massive house that has huge windows with low light interior and it's super hard to clean the inside but outside is super fast to render or even some explosion shot where fireball is hard to clean and rest is no problem and to render the image clean lets say you need 55 Camera ( AA ) samples ( rest set to 2 ) I guess this is the scenario where Adaptive would make it significantly faster to render, because instead of using 12K - 24K samples it would be 72 - 24K and since the exterior doesn't need that much samples it would not oversample the exterior.
"arnold helps you focus on staying creative rather than spending a lot of time going through settings" Vray can just be left on Brute Force GI and render just as simply as Arnold. You just have the OPTION to speed things up tremendously in Vray if you know how. So I wish everyone would stop parroting Arnold's shitty marketing excuse for being dog-poo slow. Arnold's also buggyAF, at least in Maya. Just today my scene started rendering with 100% white alpha, even if I clear the scene and render it empty with the persp camera. You can't even use textures in half the light types, it's stupid unstable in IPR and can never remember to render with the correct f'ing camera. That's been a problem in Maya since day one, but Vray fixed it for their renderer.
@@evibot4718 ofc not - jpg has no alpha - this problem is in the render view, not the batch output turns out these idiots ( autodesk ) have the alpha go solid white if you have a BG image set for interactive renders, even if that image is not there so your BG is black. I got the scene from someone else, didn't know the BG image was saved in the scene, and the path was a local one. Sloppy programming again from AD.
@schmoborama Arnold ain't bad, you're just very impatient. Obviously, it's your opinion, but you say it like it's the truth. Imagine trying to push your opinion as the truth with no proof whatsoever.
