Hi all -- Not to start another flame war, but after months struggling with what should be simple things, I have to ask:
Why is Mental Ray integration so haphazard in AD products in general and Softimage in particular? For example, MR now supports much-improved IBL, ptex, iRay, and per-object sampling settings, as well as a set of new BSDF-based surface shaders. NONE of these are exposed in Softimage. Third-party means of exposing some of these do work, but not very well. IBL, for example, seems not to support transparent shadows at all. In Maya, they work. Having only global settings for unified sampling is a crapshoot -- for some shaders, it's like super-speed, while others actually get noisier and slower. Ray-depth-based optimizations, which should be simple, have to be manually set, per parameter, IF you can even get your hands on a third-party shader that provides accurate counts of raydepth and type. Framebuffers only work properly with third-party shaders (they slow down renders ridiculously when used with the native "x" shaders) and don't properly account for reflections and refractions that are more than one ray-hit deep. The list goes on. The few features newly-exposed in Softimage, such as Unified Sampling and MetaSL, are poorly documented if at all. The only help for working with these tools, which we pay Autodesk for, comes from third parties, NVidia's forums, and Maya users. I have to spend time translating tutorials and blog posts from Maya-speak to glean the most basic information The failure on Autodesk's part seems to be universal, if worst in Softimage-land -- even though more things seem to work in Maya (or even MAX), there's little in the way of documentation or tutorials from AD. For example, because Maya's render settings are so lame and poorly-oriented for Mental Ray, there is a 3rd-party plug-in (Mental Core) simply to make it possible for users not working at fully-pipelined facilities to set up MR renders and get useful framebuffers and passes out. There is also this: http://elementalray.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/new-maya-rendering-ui-testing/ Basically, if I understand this, NVidia, not Autodesk, has written a new MR render UI for Maya, which has to be installed as a plug-in, and which bears a striking resemblance in its organization to the venerable Softimage Render Options. So AD's devs can't even port a UI that they developed from one 3D package to another? NVidia has to do it for them? Am I the only one frustrated & disappointed by this? etm
