Most, but not all... sniff...
*Tim Crowson
*/Lead CG Artist/
*Magnetic Dreams Animation Studio, Inc.
*2525 Lebanon Pike, Building C. Nashville, TN 37214
*Ph* 615.885.6801 | *Fax* 615.889.4768 | www.magneticdreams.com
[email protected]
On 11/7/2012 12:39 PM, Sandy Sutherland wrote:
I would suggest that most Softimage folk are using other renderers
such as Arnold!
S.
__
Sandy Sutherland <mailto:[email protected]> |
Technical Supervisor
<http://triggerfish.co.za/en>
<http://www.facebook.com/triggerfishanimation>
<http://www.twitter.com/triggerfishza>
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*From:* [email protected]
[[email protected]] on behalf of Ed Manning
[[email protected]]
*Sent:* 07 November 2012 20:26
*To:* [email protected]
*Cc:* [email protected]; [email protected]
*Subject:* Mental Ray Features, Integration & Autodesk's failure
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
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