The position mental images has taken for as long as I can remember (since 1994 at least) is they only make a standalone renderer. It’s up to the application developers to create the integrations.
Softimage took this challenge and made their own front end for Softimage|3D, and later in Softimage|XSI as a fully integrated solution. Alias|Wavefront later did it begrudgingly only when the tide had turned against their own in-house developed renderer, but instead of embracing the challenge like Softimage, they outsourced the job to mental images. While mental images made all the features accessible, the hookups were less than ideal. When Alias|Wavefront was acquired by Autodesk, that more or less became the accepted practice with regards to mental ray integrations. When Softimage was acquired by Autodesk, Halfdan became the inhouse expert and helped both Softimage and Maya with regards to integrations, but he later left to work at Side Effects as a Houdini developer. At roughly that same time, mental images was acquired by Nvidia and pretty much left to rot for a couple of years with no appreciable support as Thomas and a few other long time mental images employees had left the company. Only recently has Nvidia decided to put effort back into the product. That’s why things are in the mess they are in. Matt From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Andy Moorer Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2012 2:13 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Mental Ray Features, Integration & Autodesk's failure The sad thing is Mental Ray is a good and powerful renderer. Mental image's fateful decision to not participate in integration/implementation and leave it to Autodesk has done them tremendous damage. Ed, your post is dead on. There's some good tech available which isn't getting into artists's hands, and in general rendering is the point of the whole exercise, so you would expect the MR integration to be something given constant attention and priority. Sent from my iPad On Nov 7, 2012, at 1:44 PM, Juhani Karlsson <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Definetly and thats why I think everyone working on anything serious in softimage has moved to 3rd party renderers. (Arnold, v-ray, 3Delight) Kinda wish they would forget MR altogether and focus on more important stuff. -j On 7 November 2012 20:26, Ed Manning <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: 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 -- -- Juhani Karlsson 3D Artist/TD Talvi Digital Oy Pursimiehenkatu 29-31 b 2krs. 00150 Helsinki +358 443443088 [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> www.vimeo.com/talvi<http://www.vimeo.com/talvi>
