Max 7 Lights with Mental Ray

[OllyNicholson]

Hi, I have been using 3DS max for years and I am switching over to using Mental Ray to render with as I have need for (among other things) accurate area lights and soft edged shadows for highly photo-real architectural visualisations

 

My question is : can anybody reccomend any literature/on-line info on using Mental Ray, esp with 3DS max. I have done many of the tutorials but I am still having trouble grappling the concepts of which lights/shaders/materials/global illumination you can and can't use succesfully with Mental Ray. In short here are my queries:

 

* Is there any good info/literature on Mental Ray with Max

* Any simple reccomendations - do's and don't's etc with mental ray?

* When to use mental ray and when not

* Which light types, for outdoor scenes, indoor close-ups etc.

 

Any help much appreciated

 

Olly

[Arnold Sher]

i do have to say that when it comes to Mental Ray tutorials or in fact literature i am yet to come across something that is useful. The stuff that comes from dicreet is rubbish and is really unhelpful and it took us months of testing and playing with it to figure out what is what and we kind of have it down. The only issue being is that we found out the settings for various lights and it really works however as soon as you very those and in particular anything to do do with photons and caustics everything goes all over the place. However in saying that we really enjoy using that as it has unmatching quality for our interior scenes. Draw back being that is not compatible with RPC and makes it fairly difficult to use it for anything else but the stills.

 

Should you require anything particular in terms of the set up you are welcome to contact us directly and we will see what we can do for you.

[OllyNicholson]

Thanks Arnold, after a few conversations it does sound like Mental Ray is a bit of a can of fiddly worms, albeit very attractive worms. I have a 6 week project including interior and exterior and possibly some animated walkthrough stuff, I only have 3 days untill it begins and I don't want to go down a one way mental ray street, so to speak - so I may have to leave my options open

 

I am also planning to use some RPC stuff - does this rule out mental ray altogether?

 

Apart from the caustics and soft edged shadows, is there much else I would be lacking if I stuck to the scan-line renderer?

 

 

Olly

[mbr]

Forget Mental Ray. Render times alone will kill you. In this office that I am working in I believe the lowest rendering time for an interior animation that's been reached is 1.5 hrs PER frame! Insane, imho.

 

But you get much more than caustics (forget that rendering time with caustics, it'd take exponenetially longer) and soft shadows. You get GI (what you are thinking about for the soft shadows, most likely).

 

Stick with scanliine, you can get decent results. Just use a TON of omnis with soft shadows and look at the tutorials by some of the masters.

[bcampbell]

I have been a newbie to mental ray for 4 weeks now and yes I am still struggling. One of the things I have found that has hindered me is many forums and many confilcting techniques for lighting and GI setups for mental ray. One of the reasons I am interested in Mental ray is the thought of predictable results for fast render and lighting setups for future projects - thats why I am putting triple the amount of time neccessary into this project so I can get my head around mental ray, I hope it is worth it!

 

From the two scenes (external) that I have completed I can say that after a lot of pain the outcome (I believe) is worth it, and at 8 mins a frame (where my scanline fakeosity backup took 15mins) I am impressed with the speed when you finally get the settings right. I'm not impressed with some of the bugs I have found like black patches in my render and thee dreaded GI and FG flicker but I have managed to find fixes for both.

 

Some resources I have found that has helped me are below:

 

Internal Lighting

Global Illumination

Sampling

 

Mostly Maya guides but they are good guides.

[Bugga_Guy]

3D quakers has a some tutorials to buy: but I am not sure if they are worth the money.

 

http://3dquakers1.com/webroot5/review.php?id=7

[bcampbell]

One thing I would find very helpfull is a guide on GI diagnostics.

 

It's very pretty but what does it mean?

[psv]

search in max help and if not, go there:

 

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=104578

 

or there

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=190232&page=1&pp=15

or there

http://www.lamrug.org/

or there

http://www.treddi.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=8436

 

have a nice and long long weekend

 

sorin

[raysyu]

I have been using mental ray for a year, i love it for sigle image rendering, i hate it for animation. However, mental ray is not really slow compared to the other photo realistic rendering engines like vray and final render. The point is that the one like Vray provides a kind of "idiotic" setting that hardly expresses your identity, on the contratry Mental ray is more flexible and creative. The setting of mental ray is not hard, the hard part is its shaders that will take forever to go through. The concepts of GI and Fg could be penetrated just like a paper. From my experience, for exterior rendering, we don't really need GI that only downgrade the effect a little bit, but we gain much more time; for interior, both GI and FG are critical to deal with unbeatable final result.

[Brett]

With such a short timeframe I would stick with what you know as MR requires a long learning curve. Render times are shorter with 7.5 (much) if you set it up right and don’t go for 100% best MR quality. The other hitch is crawling during animation - it will get you. I suggest testing on non-paying projects or long deadline projects first and then put it to work on real projects. That’s what we did and it seems to be working after a year:-)

 

Thanks Arnold, after a few conversations it does sound like Mental Ray is a bit of a can of fiddly worms, albeit very attractive worms. I have a 6 week project including interior and exterior and possibly some animated walkthrough stuff, I only have 3 days untill it begins and I don't want to go down a one way mental ray street, so to speak - so I may have to leave my options open

 

I am also planning to use some RPC stuff - does this rule out mental ray altogether?

 

Apart from the caustics and soft edged shadows, is there much else I would be lacking if I stuck to the scan-line renderer?

 

 

Olly