Hello, I was beginning to ponder, in another thread, some rendering issues in SI. I've never really liked mental ray, tried to, spent a long time studying it, and could never get the kind of aesthetic I was able to achieve in Lightwave, with the Steve Worley plugin FPrime, or the newer Kray, which was beginning a promising development about when I left. Seems to have taken off now, too.
I ported several projects over from Lightwave to XSI some years ago, and tried to reproduce the very nice rendering results I got in Lightwave. Totally different system of course. I figured it was one good approach to learning mental ray. Well, I couldn't get anywhere close, and it was a struggle, and I never really got acceptable results. Every other aspect of the projects went so much better, though, in XSI. And there was animation in XSI I couldn't even begin to do in Lightwave. I need fast GI effects, that's integral to what I do. A lot of interior architectural-like surfaces. Not necessarily total realism, just an aesthetic -- I need to really be able to get in there and tweak things and make them work. I use a lot of HDR lighting, I know how to hand tweak it in photoshop, or create it from scratch, and I like to use that to control my light and color. I've used FG quite a bit, and am not always happy how it translates things. GI is way too slow in my scenes. FPrime and Kray had a way of handling these GI lighting effects that was very efficient, and tweakable. That's the one thing from Lightwave that I REALLY miss. Anything comparable for Softimage? I remember I also could get some reflectivity and ray tracing in Lightwave at a fraction of the rendering time mental ray takes. I can't use it at all in mental ray, with GI (including FG) except on a single object basis. Not for animation on many frames, too costly. But I do like the nodal texturing system built into SI. Anyway, considering these factors, is there any rendering solution for SI that anyone can recommend that will give me what I'm looking for? That isn't too expensive... Thanks, Nancy Jacobs http://www.childofillusion.net/
