So I'm abandoned… :) Well, even mentalray may not the best solution for film and vfx anymore, it is still quite suitable for other areas such as arch-viz or industrial animations. Not to mention, that Arnold could handle these areas as well and maybe better. On the other hand, BUF Compagnie is still using mental ray, right? Not sure about it, but their VFX shots looks to me like mental ray. And BUF definetly do outstanding visuals.
I agree to the bad integration of MR shaders in softimage and the rather poor documentation around MR in general. Aaand its slower performance in certain areas. But take away documentation, performance and a few flaws, we do still have a p̶o̶v̶r̶a̶y̶ oops ...I meant a good render engine out of the box ;) Seriously, lets say arnold would be built-in... Five rendernodes are about the equivalent to one softimage seat. Well, not exactly but even MR is about 1.000€ per machine as standalone. Let's call it 'overprized' but six renderlics comes with one soft license. I think it's still a good deal. You should see mental ray as a free giveaway within softimage… cheers, sven From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2012 20:10 To: [email protected] Subject: RE: Mental Ray Features, Integration & Autodesk's failure meanwhile one guy manages to write renderer that is on par with vray (corona renderer). Aint mentaldelay abandoware anyways? Od: Ed Manning Wysłano: 7 listopada 2012 19:26 Do: <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] DW: <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected]; <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] Temat: 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/> 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
