Rendering Gemstones, which is best Vray or Brazil

Rendering
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I have lots of renders of gemstones to do. I realize I have to purchase a bit of render software and have narrowed it down to Brazil or Vray. I will be using the render software for other sorts of scenes but the main renders are close ups of gemstones.
Any tips? Thanks.

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They are both excellent rendering engines and it’s very much up to personal preferences.
Best advise is to download both and give them a good try.

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Both will work fine…a piece of advice. Invest time and maybe money to get good ones…HDRIs. That will be the secret to success.

1 Like
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Hi Shane,

In my opinion, you’ll need to use a renderer with specular dispersion and caustic photons to achieve certain gemstone qualities, some non-biased engines may also produce these effects. I won’t make it sound easy because it’s not in any render engine I know but here’s a quick sample (53 second render at 640x480) that I threw together in Brazil that you can look through. I used an object from the Polyhedron plugin for my ‘gem’. If you do a lot of this stuff, you’ll be best to set up some scenes for different sized objects. There are many variables such as photon counts, light size and distance, light photon focusing… etc. and you’ll often have to tweak settings in any scene to get the look right on any new model.

GemPolyhedron_Brazil.zip (1.6 MB)

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What made you discard Maxwell btw?

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Thanks Wim

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I had a look at Maxwell s tutorials but decided not to use the software because I was so unfamiliar with the software. I spend quite allot of time learning plugins and other bits of software which becomes much more difficult for me when I have to jump from platform to platform and learn the logic of another layout.
Your question has helped me focus on this very issue which is a constant concern when choosing which software to learn. I decided upon Brazil as I’m fairly conversant with the logic of the platform as its very similar to Rhinos standard render.

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Thanks PaulS

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Hi BrianJ,
I really appreciate the detailed answer you posted.
many thanks

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I’m a V-Ray users, in my opinion:
Maxwell it’s technically better, but it’s unbiased so you have to like waiting longer time for clean images
Brazil it’s more integrated, and probably simple to use.
V-Ray it’s a Swiss knife, but you have to know what you are doing.

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Thanks skysurfer!