steffenhoesel

hehe, yeah. a huge render farm for a huge scene is a little bit out of my budget i guess. However, i cant get enough information on mental ray (and optimization of it in particular) and im always happy to hear from others experiences. And so i have the feeling that there still might be a trick hidden somewhere, to improve performance with IBL. As far as i can remember, Maya had IBL with mr for a long time exposed in the UI already and i played around with that some years ago. And if i remember right, you had a lot of options to tweak the IBL there. Im absolutely sure, that it at least were way more options, than just the one for shadow quality you have within Max. And even that is not long in there already. Can it be, that you can get something done with String Options here? I have no real experience with that, but maybe you guys already tweaked something with that?! Would be nice if you could share your experiences. Thx again Steffen

Hey George, thanks for your point on this. Actually the scene isnt very dark at all. Since im planning to replace the Background later in the Post, i took an HDRI from the SIBL Archive (Walk of Fame) that gives me a really nice lighting situation over all. It is dimmed down a bit, thats right, but overall its not very dark at all. I had it a bit darker in the first place and already raised the Output of the Map, because i first thought the same as you do. But it had no effect on the render times; they are nearly the same (Output 0,3 compared to Output 1,0). In the meantime, i somehow solved the problem by separating the huge amount of small Asteroids from the rest - to be able to render them in a separate Pass without IBL. This works for now. I can render the bigger Asteroids as well as the huge (and highly detailed) one in the center without problems. And after that i render the pass with just the small ones and "Skylight from FG" on instead of IBL. And finally i render everything together again, but with black on everything apart from the small roids and no FG. While having Self Illumination Mat (pure white) on the small roids to get the Mask for comping them in. Although i loose some of the nice shadows because of this, i noticed that in the animation itself one cannot really see this if he/she doesnt look very close. And because there will be another POV in the meantime until the camera reaches the center (FumeFX will be this one), i think that i can live with that. However, if still someone has an idea on general techniques how to thread IBL better when you have larger scenes, i would be happy to hear your opinion as well! Many thanks in advance again Steffen

Hey guys, i have a short question: Do you know how to most efficiently render large scale Scenes consisting of thousands of MR Proxy's with the Skylight IBL in Mental Ray? I have created a rather huge Asteroid Field made out of polygon reduced rocks and in total there are round about 280.000 objects in MR Proxys scattered throughout the scene. One big roid in the center is the POV and has even more detail in form of MR Proxys added on top with Object Paint. The camera is flying through that field to finally reach that big Roid in the center. At the moment it isnt possible for me to render this with IBL. Even if i decrease the Shadow Quality, Rendertimes on a Testframe size of 711x400 already take more than 14 minutes to complete. I need to render in 720p; so this would take even longer. Do you have any tipps how to optimize this? Or is it just not possible to render such a large scene with IBL efficiently? Thanks for your help! subbz2k

Hey guys, its my first post in this forum, so: Hello at all out there :-) Now to my problem: I need a solution for baking ParticleFlow Meshes (created by the Shape Instance) to disk for bringing them into a single object i can then cache with the Geo Cache from MentalRay - so that everything just renders quickly. I havent found anything apart from the PFlow Baker Script. But this doesnt work for me; it crashes Max even if i use just 1% of my smallest PF Source ^^ My scene consists of 2 PF Sources; one has just around 20.000 Objects in it; the other one has 350.000 Objects in it. They are all Groups of several polygon reduced Asteroids distributed in various random sizes within a very large Cube Volume to create a believable Asteroid Field with Debris in an Intro Scene im working on. I need to activate "Mesh per Particle" in the PF Sources Main Render Settings already so that they are even fully rendered. Calculation Time per Frame is no problem; it is still relatively fast, but: Final Gathering takes insane amounts of time to calculate the Map for all those individual objects. And as far as i know this can be greatly reduced when you make a single object out of them all. So thats why i need to somehow bake the PFlow Animation of all Meshes into a Single or individual Meshes (i can then combine manually again), speed up translation times by activating the Geo Cache and (hopefully) reduce those insane Final Gather calculation times. Are there any plugins out there, that REALLY get this job done properly? Commercial or not - doesnt matter! Or is there another way (workaround) to get this done? Many thanks for your help in advance Steffen