This was a project from early last year. It was a pretty simple model but was the first time I'd been able to use VRay for any of my projects. From what I've seen so far, I think it gives you much better results 'out of the box' than mental ray but there's obviously a learning curve with it like with any renderer. Whilst mental ray has been my best friend over the last couple of years, there are always some enforced workarounds or certain ways of doing things that you have to take into account. Luckily this project was only stills, I'm still trying to sort out my workflow for GI and animation in VRay. Even with a cached irradiance pass, frames seem to take an absolute age to render. I guess this is partly because it's blending frames to eliminate flicker but even so I think I'm missing something. I'm hoping to spend a few evenings getting to grips with it and doing some tests over the next few weeks.
The car paint shader was a little complex on this model too. There was a point info sampler node plugged into a ramp that was in turn plugged into the base colour of a VRay car material, just to get that incidental colour shift based on the camera position. most of the other materials were pretty standard. The tyre had quite a high number of polys so the sides had a separate UV set to the detailed sections. This allowed me to add the text and detailing on the side and keep the more detailed sections clear. There was a little colour correction and then grade added to each image and obviously a cheeky lens flare or two. It'd be rude not to.
The car paint shader was a little complex on this model too. There was a point info sampler node plugged into a ramp that was in turn plugged into the base colour of a VRay car material, just to get that incidental colour shift based on the camera position. most of the other materials were pretty standard. The tyre had quite a high number of polys so the sides had a separate UV set to the detailed sections. This allowed me to add the text and detailing on the side and keep the more detailed sections clear. There was a little colour correction and then grade added to each image and obviously a cheeky lens flare or two. It'd be rude not to.