all of which require hundreds/thousands of man-hours that will never be recouped. Neither scenario allows for a professional team of paid developers to invest the time needed to create a truly AAA commercial plugin that has ongoing development, support resources etc.

Philosophically, the only way it would ever make sense to develop plugins for Blender is if you're willing to do so completely free of charge in your spare time, or to beg for donations and hope to make enough to cover the cost of your time investment. Besides, the reality is that Blender users by and large have come to expect 'Free' to be part of the deal, and few would ever pay for the Standalone product. Alternatively, they could resort to all manner of crazy backend communications between a 'free' blender plugin and the 'paid' Vray standalone, but this has substantial limitations (basic things like IPR would be an issue). Here's a simple fact that everyone here needs to accept in order to understand what's going on.īlender operates under a GPL license, and Chaos Group would ALSO have to release Vray under a GPL license in order to comply with Blender's terms. They just don't have the courage to admit it. While render speed does matter, the lack of texture/shader/light previews make it hard to develop any significant render scene making it much less productive.įor anyone interested in Vray I would suggest staying away from its Blender version since not even the devs have an interest in the project anymore. AFAIK Vray was not even tested in Blender but Max in those tests.īlender with Vray additions is currently an old, incomplete implementation of Vray Next for 2.79.

They even said in this thread they were focusing on the existing implementation only.Īs for Andrew's video, I don't take these engine comparisons too seriously since it's really hard to make a fair one having so many factors into account. It's not like they planned to add RT or anything. The 2.8+ update basically has the same restrictions as 2.79 so I don't think licensing is a deterrent. I understand Blender's GPL could be a factor in the difficulty to integrate a tool like Vray? Is this true?

Vray for blender