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So I downloaded the V-Ray for Maya demo yesterday, and wow, I can see why it's so popular.

Not that I can do things in V-Ray that I can't do in mental ray, but what took me *days* to figure out in mr took like an hour to do in vray. There are only a handful of V-Ray material/light types, and a few screens of global options. Also, the V-ray docs are pretty good, documenting each option in plain English. (e.g "turn the slider this way for this effect, and turn it that way for that effect" ) And there are lots of examples showing the different effect the options have.

But most importantly, I got decent renders out-of-the-box, with no tweaking at all. It Just Worked. And I think that's key. For me, and I suspect most other beginners/hobbyists, getting good renders right away really helped to encourage me to continue exploring the options further, seeing how I could tweak little things here and there. With mr it feels like I have to constantly fight it to do what I want, till I give up and Google around for tips and tutorials. With V-Ray I barely ever had to look outside of the docs.

Anyways, here is the product of about 2 hours of tinkering with V-Ray last night. I dug up this old scene, replaced all the mr materials with V-Ray ones, and bumped up the subdivs to smooth out the shadows.

I did cheat a bit and render out the AO in a separate mr pass, because the V-Ray dirt map was turning some of my objects black. Probably the normals are flipped on some objects. I then comp'ed the AO in post.
Render time was about 2.5 h

Description
So I downloaded the V-Ray for Maya demo yesterday, and wow, I can see why it's so popular.

Not that I can do things in V-Ray that I can't do in mental ray, but what took me *days* to figure out in mr took like an hour to do in vray. There are only a handful of V-Ray material/light types, and a few screens of global options. Also, the V-ray docs are pretty good, documenting each option in plain English. (e.g "turn the slider this way for this effect, and turn it that way for that effect" ) And there are lots of examples showing the different effect the options have.

But most importantly, I got decent renders out-of-the-box, with no tweaking at all. It Just Worked. And I think that's key. For me, and I suspect most other beginners/hobbyists, getting good renders right away really helped to encourage me to continue exploring the options further, seeing how I could tweak little things here and there. With mr it feels like I have to constantly fight it to do what I want, till I give up and Google around for tips and tutorials. With V-Ray I barely ever had to look outside of the docs.

Anyways, here is the product of about 2 hours of tinkering with V-Ray last night. I dug up this old scene, replaced all the mr materials with V-Ray ones, and bumped up the subdivs to smooth out the shadows.

I did cheat a bit and render out the AO in a separate mr pass, because the V-Ray dirt map was turning some of my objects black. Probably the normals are flipped on some objects. I then comp'ed the AO in post.
Render time was about 2.5 h