We are pretty much doing the same here - we did Zam in MR and it did
get there and looked good for what it needed to be - but I have a few
more grey hairs because of it - Khumba has been such a pleasure to
light and render in Arnold and it just looks so much better so much
easier!
Sorry - not meaning to add to any software wars - but it is difficult
to keep in the amazement we get at seeing our renders now!
S.
__
Sandy Sutherland <mailto:[email protected]> |
Technical Supervisor
<http://triggerfish.co.za/en>
<http://www.facebook.com/triggerfishanimation>
<http://www.twitter.com/triggerfishza>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* [email protected]
[[email protected]] on behalf of Votch
[[email protected]]
*Sent:* 08 November 2012 07:28
*To:* softimage
*Subject:* Re: Mental Ray Features, Integration & Autodesk's failure
I'm rendering scenes in sitoa with >20trillion triangles (instanced),
2 diffuse bounces, 2 glossy bounces, refraction (yes I said it),
thousands of textures, Motion Blur, and very complex lighting at 4K
in under 6 hours per frame. Render nodes are not exotic 24HT cores and
32GB ram.
No baking, no pre-processing.
That's a 4k render in 6 hours. HD is around 2 hours per
frame. It's comedic to say these stats out loud.
I could NEVER do anything like this in MentalRay or Mantra or prMan.
LBA (that's "Life Before Arnold") I would not have thought this possible.
V-
On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 2:12 PM, Andy Moorer <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
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 <tel:%2B358%20443443088>
[email protected]
www.vimeo.com/talvi <http://www.vimeo.com/talvi>
