Over the past 2 weeks, I've begun experimenting with the demo version of Vray 3.1 for Maya! Although I'm not sold, I think it's starting to grow on me as I figure out its alien, yet somehow familiar, nature. I started to like it a lot more once I found the Ambient Occlusion shader equivalent. It is actually called the Dirt Texture in VRay. It works a little different in some ways but is mostly compatible. I was able to rig up an equivalent to Rederick's body shader setup from Mental Ray.

I haven't done a formal comparison, but I've quickly grown fond of the VRay version. Rather than pipe into a Phong E (which I can't seem to get working) I pipe it into the standard VRay material, which similar to the x_passes mia material. Most of the same options are available in one form or another. The Vray material also has a drop down for choosing the reflection model. Ward is something I don't have an equivalent to in Mental Ray/Maya (that I can figure) and I really love the soft highlighting it does! I pipe in an extra helping of the gold color, that's usually part of the AO shader, as a darker shade into the reflection color to help shore up the more subtle dirt parameter. I haven't quite finished tweaking the dirt parameter.

Really happy with it in the upper corners!

But, VRay has made me acutely aware of something I hadn't messed with in Maya or Mental Ray yet: Color correction and gamma setting. Maya/Mental Ray default to 2.2 gamma. If you enable both color correction and gamma in VRay, you get something like the lower right corner. Worse yet, Blythe looks best with a gamma of 2.2, while Rederick looks best without alteration. So, I've narrowed it down to a happy medium of 1.5 as in the lower left corner, so I can make sure they both look good when they end up together!

Lots of tweaking and exploring left to do. Still haven't decided if I want to break down and buy VRay, but it's certainly putting up a good showing!