IR can be tremendously good tool, but people falsely consider it to be much faster than pure path tracing because they get "nice&clean" pictures fast. The fact is, most people
can't really see the huge quality difference you can get under different setup IR parameters. Once you have a complicated scene, with retrace thresholds and additional Detail enhancement,
you easily get render times that rival Brute Force in Vray because you need to solve a lot of artifacts appearing but still keep certail detail away from blurrying.
IR's strength is flexibility, not speed per se. Most people think it's fast, because they have it by default very low, that's what they're used to seeing, it's what gives them quite shitty results but they will never care to notice. It is only fast as long as it's extremely unprecise, and interpolated to avoid artifacts, but that's is exactly where it is best for animation purpose of static scenes.
My only qualm in Vray is that IR's samples are also governed by DMC, something that makes it harder to manage in complicated interiors because you weight in GI together with material shading,and all else. Also, maybe too much potato paramaters that nobody will ever understand so everyone just changes HSPV and interpolation leading. Detail Enhancement (local brute force bounce thingy) is nice touch.
To be honest, I lately change between Vray and Corona seemlessly depending on what I want in particular projects. Animations are of course, completely in domain of Vray because of IR, but even stills get evenly distributed. The biggest stregth of Corona is incredibly nice, precise and believable GI. Even pure Vray's BF+BF isn't such, the details are slightly unnatural in that they always go into dark tone regardless of soem secondary reflections or etc..
All in, all out, I wouldn's say you'll get better render times in Corona compared to Vray. I would say these overstatments come from overly enthuasiastic users getting such times from easy scenes with easy setups. I would say in similar quality, the times can be close to equal at best. But it's better to look at the whole setup time/quality/speed not just speed alone to make your complete opinion.
« Last Edit: 2014-02-12, 15:16:50 by Juraj_Talcik »
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