ramy

Looks like an issue with Nitrous. Try going to Viewport Settings and Preferences and change Default Lights from "1" to "2" and see what that does.

Just curious, has anyone here used rendernodemonitor.com for production in their studio? I like the idea of it, but makes me real nervous installing a software on our internal farm to send data out to a website. I also haven't seen any relevant feedback or comments on their post here. Does anyone have real experience with this tool?

I had the privilege of interviewing Marcin Gruszczyk, and have posted it on my website. He also goes through his render process. Really nice stuff: http://www.ramyhanna.com/2012/12/interview-with-marcin-gruszczyk.html

Here are some still renderings from this same project. All done in mental ray: http://www.ramyhanna.com/2012/10/wsol-renderings.html

Thanks. Thorsten, just updated it to vimeo.

All, I finished the animation to this project and kept it in vray. Thought I would share: http://www.ramyhanna.com/2012/10/wul.html

interesting...i've never seen this before...i'll have to take a closer look.

Thanks for all the tips and input everyone. A couple of things about rendering speeds. There are only a few things that actually control affect the efficiency of rendering, so here is a list of what does or does not affect the rendering, in mr (vr does have light maps that affect the rasterizing process such as glossy reflections in light-cache, and light shadows in irr-map): -Any pre-calculation of Indirect Illumination (ie: GI/FG), do not affect the rendering speed (the rasterizing process), assuming that this is pre-calculated and read from a cached file. It makes no difference if 50 or 500 Rays per FG point were calculated. This also applies to the Energy Photon settings in lights. -Things that do affect rendering speed: materials (textures, reflections, refractions), shadow samples (point shadow vs. rectangle vs. ies), of course renderer sampling settings / filters / spacial contrast, and how many cores/buckets you can get I found the major killer in my mr renderings as someone pointed out are the mrSkyPortals. Even with the mr_blackbody (this simply controls the kelvin color of the light), they are great lights with great shadows but big time killers. I managed to get this 800 px image to render in mr at 9min15sec with unified sampling with a couple of tricks: A work around that is somewhat of a trick is to pre-calc GI/FG with mrSkyPortals on, then turn them off when it actually comes down to rendering. Sure you don't get the direct illumination and shadows, but you still get the GI/FG color of the sky put into your scenes. I also applied this trick to the rectangular phtotometric lights. When it came time to render, I turned them off and unhid a replacement geometry with an A&D glow applied. This cut down on the shadow samples completely and made the render much faster, still using the GI/FG from the original photometrics...very unconventional. Overall, if I don't have moBlur or DOF in the render, I'll stay away from unified and stick to standard sampling.

Thorsten, even with your suggested settings, I'm still getting very slow renderings with unified. Even with a material override of a plain grey A&D material the render times were just too slow. I'm not using DOF or moBlur, so it seems unified is not the best solution for this situation. I will say from my tests that when you do include DOF and moBlur in the render unified is much faster than anything else.

Guys thanks for the comments. I did some test scenes for testing sampling between mr unified sampling and vr DMC and in a simple test scene didn't really notice a difference. However in a production environment (the example above) they were no where close. A little about the renderings on this thread: MR image: GI and FG were precalculated, so render above is reading them from file. There is 1 mrSkyPortal (above opening on left), and the rest are photometric lights; The rectangle lights above each have 2 shadow samples. The pendant lights are actually point shapes. 3 ies over the menus. Sampling is using unified with min:1, max:100, quality: 0.5, threshold: 0.04. VR image: LC and IR were precaluclated, and render is reading from file as well. All lights are vray lights. 1 rectangle light for opening with outdoor setting. Rectangular lights on ceiling are straight forward. The pendant lights are actually vray light spheres. Sampling is using Adaptive DMC with min:1, max:6. DMC sampler at default values. If anything, based on the lights, the mr should go faster. This is a huge scene with a building that is modeled inside and out, with 3 floors and alot of entourage. The only thing that I can think of is that vray simply handles what is immediately at hand better than mr with really large scenes. Was really surprised to see this as I've been using mr for years and usually get comparable results. Guess not this time.

Ok. I've been working on an animation for the last several months using mental ray. I've been really happy with the lighting results, but totally frustrated with the sampling. I switched over to unified sampling in mental ray hoping it would work faster...it did, but even with the noise in the image I was still getting 30min / frame @ 800px. It was just too slow for an animation. So I thought I'd switch everything over to v-ray. WOW. Off the bat I was getting crazy fast rendering times with very comparable results. I will say that the materials and lighting in mr are more "physically accurate", the results in v-ray are great considering the render times. Here are my results... If you want to know more about my sampling tests here are the links: DMC vs. Unified Unified sampling happy rendering!

Looking for this too!

You can't necessarily merge 2 existing FG files together, but you can always add to an existing FG map by using the "Incrementally Add FG Points to Map Files" option.

Ahhh the memories. My first computer was purchased in 1990. It was a 386 with 30MB HDD and 2MB RAM. The most exiting part was later buying Creatives Multimedia Suite that came with a Sound Blaster sound card!!! It made playing Monkey Island amazing!

After playing with the free plugin...it is definitely a great solution to any of the other renderer plugins for SU. Hands down better than VR for SU plugin. That one didn't like heavy scenes. But this one seems to handle them fine! But for the cost...it's a not brainer. I'm thinking about buying it for our office....this is just what SU needed! Way to get back on the map Maxwell.