Vray vs U34 for rendering

Okay, so I installed a trial version of Vray for 3DS Max to do some rendering for some cover art for my game. I am really happy with the results. However, when my trial period expires (30 days), it’s going to cost me 3000 to buy it! I don’t have an extra 3K lying around at the moment. Can UE4 render like Vray does? Can it offer some sort of substitute?

Vray is an offline renderer.
Of course UE won’t result in fancy raytraced images.
You can however fake alot.

UE4 makes a lot of sacrifices to get good realtime performance, but it’s something that can produce acceptable quality for many archviz projects. I’d say it takes a little bit longer to set up, mainly because you have to create a new UV channel for lightmaps which isn’t something you have to do for Vray, and building lighting can still take a while, but once it’s done you can do very high resolution images and animations in very little time. For a lot of people, doing an animation with their Vray projects isn’t an option due to the time it takes to render, but it’s something that can now be done using UE4.

That’s a good point, there are some good looking Architecture renders out there. Well that’s good to know. I can’t afford Vray, as awesome as it is. I guess I’ll read through the Docs. Will they cover UV channels and lightmaps? Thanks.

Yeah there’s information there on that:

Epic is also making some tools for 3ds Max/Maya that will make it much easier for archviz to move scenes to UE4 quickly, but it’s still in development

No it cannot MATCH the quality of vray for rendering quality.
BUT it can do what vray does for the most part. AND UE4 renders in realtime, what vray takes minutes to do for just a still image…
the image quality of UE4 has become REALLY good now though. and if you’re just doing a still, then you have no performance limitations. IMO you can achieve about 90% of what vray can do. which is PLENTY

Also, 3dsmax comes with a builtin FREE renderer that does eveyrthing vray does. it’s called Arnold and is easier to use than Vray (less settings).
If you’re using an older version of max then it won’t be Arnold it’ll be Iray, which also does the same and is free :slight_smile:

Yea I want to render cutscenes, so there will be plenty of motion involved. Which I’m wondering, for the sake of cutting down on animation time, UE4 may be the way to go. Otherwise in 3DS max I’ll have to do keyframe animation. There are no bipeds in the game so motion capture isn’t really an option. Whereas in UE4 I already have some anim blueprints set up. Maybe I could just use those in addition to keyframe animation? Could UE4 support that?

Corona renderer is an offline renderer as good (if not better) than vray and they have a fairly cheap subscription model. Around 20-25$/month iirc. It’s deeply integrated within 3ds max.
Fstorm is a gpu offline renderer that looks very promising, that is DIRT cheap for now, and is also well integrated with max.

Lots of options actually. Octane renderer for Unity is in beta. Will come to UE4 soon after according to the devs. Best of both worlds.

UE4 has some basic animation options but it’s not as good as the animation tools in Max, if you’re using UE4 to render animations you’re better off creating the animations in 3ds Max first.

Buy Corona for ~25 euros a month, instead of making your life much more complicated…

That’s not really a solution, even if you can cut your render time to like 10 minutes per frame that’s a huge difference compared to less than a second to render in UE4

And if you want to mess with it, you can use Nvidia VXGI to do fully dynamic lighting which would mean you don’t have to do lightmaps or build lighting which would make it even easier. Only issue is that VXGI isn’t going to get as good of results as baked lighting and you have to compile the VXGI branch of the UE4 source code to get access to it which can be a bit confusing if you aren’t a programmer.