I use mental ray almost exclusively for any project so far, even I'm evaluated arnold, redshift and maxwell. Maxwell is so far the most accurate renderer I've seen so far in terms of light distribution in a scene and nothing comes close to it in my opinion. It's amazing if you do product rendering only. But it lacks in shader variety, softimage integration and general tweaking, as mental ray has and allows. Arnold may be a killer for big projects, heavy scenes but its expensive. Redshift is affordable,has good GI for animations and the best integration in Softimage besides mental ray (I'm still wondering how they managed to get the round corners shader into RS! I was thinking it's a mental images/NVIDIA patent) There are only two things that stopped me switching from mr to RS: 1. I don't want to throw away a expensive CPU based renderfarm. 2. mental ray still has more shaders. It's slow sometimes but it is rather good when you want to do non physically based things. A bit like Softimage itself, the all-purpose, swiss knife.
So yes, I use mental ray. sven -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Matt Lind Sent: Saturday, May 28, 2016 12:28 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Anybody still using mental ray? While on the subject of nostalgia and recent release of various tools for XSI. I have a selection of mental ray shaders I wrote long ago still perfectly valid as they're utility nodes for accessing renderer preferences, lights, performing math, or other basic features missing from the native shader library. Some have unique features, but also limitations due to mental ray's architecture. If released, would anybody actually use them other than for tinkering? As in, does anybody still use mental ray in a serious production context where you'd benefit from such shaders? Don't say yes because you want free digital swag. Matt ------ Softimage Mailing List. To unsubscribe, send a mail to [email protected] with "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm. ------ Softimage Mailing List. To unsubscribe, send a mail to [email protected] with "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm.
