Karlfucious

First off I wouldn't use photo entourage for NPR renderings. At least use a few Photoshop filters and blending modes to make them look part of the image. Also you could just make them a solid white with a lower opacity and an outline. Second the image needs some shadows. Right now it looks really flat and some shadows will ad a lot of depth and interest to the image. You should list the software used so we can give you more accurate crits on how to improve the image.

No feedback at all?

I did this scene for practice since I haven't done anything in a while. Rendered in Maya/Mental Ray. Crits are much appreciated.

With Maya 2010 you shouldn't have to edit the Maya.rayrc file anymore. Just make sure you placed all the files in their proper directories. If you already have it should work. I am assuming you are looking under mental ray materials instead of Maya materials in the Hypershade. If not make sure you change it to Mental Ray Materials.

This script written by Chris Fullmer should do exactly what you need. You can find it here.http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=19076

Thanks. I'm using SU 7. I am having a hard time finding the balance with detail and it still looking like a watercolor painting. Maybe an Ink lines around the Stonework might help without detracting from the image.

Here is a house i did on my free time for fun. Modeled in Sketchup and rendered in Photoshop. Let me know what you think.

Connecting mental ray lights is pretty easy. In the lights attributes there is a slot called light shader. In that slot is where you connect the mental ray light in most cases. There are a few exceptions as Hamburger Train mentioned about the mib_cie_d and such. Also If you are using GI you need to attach photonic lights to the Photon shader slots as well. Here are a few useful links that should help you out a lot. Here is a great set of tutorials for interiors www.floze.org/2008/07/six-tuts-on-light-and-shade-part-i.html video tutorials, shaders, exc. www.mymentalray.com CGTalk which is probably the most active maya forum that I have found anywhere. Also full of great imformation from professionals. http://forums.cgsociety.org/forumdisplay.php?f=87 Digital Tutors. A great site with tons of DVD training. Also Quite a few free videos as well. http://www.digitaltutors.com/digital_tutors/index.php Gnomon. Great DVD training. Not Free but well worth it. http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/ I hope those help out a little.

Welcome. First off the reason why you have to group and rotate is because by default Maya's up axis is in the Y direction where as in most other software its Z. You can change your up axis in the preferences. Mental Ray Materials are better because they are more accurate. Also in most cases they render faster than the Maya equivalent because they do not have as many attributes to calculate. For arch vis work you should primarily use the MIA material. It has neat little features and a lot of presets that make your life easier. Mental Ray Lights are also more accurate. With Mental ray lights you still have to use regular maya lights but you have to connect a mental ray node to the light shader.

You could try deleting your prefrences as tommy noted. If that doesnt work you may want to try updating your video card drivers.

I typically use the map exporter utility written by francescaluce of ctrl studio. Here is where you can find it http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=87&t=194935&highlight=.map. Hope that helps

I can't really comment on how well blender translates the files over since I've never used it but Sketchup converts over really clean geometry. Instead of importing a bunch of garbled triangles it tries to keep planar faces as ngons where possible. The only places it triangulates the mesh is where holes occur. That makes cleanup a much easier process and saves a lot of time. Also, all the face normals are in the correct direction. Another plus of using the sketch up method as mentioned before is the fact that blocks/families convert to instance copies in Maya. So If you need to further detail a window you can model on one and the changes will carry over to each identical window. With all that said there is no perfect translation. Sketch up is just the best I've found so far. Not only that Sketchup is a very handy little tool that I find invaluable to my pipeline.

I find that using sketchup as a bridge between autocad / revit to maya gives me the best results so far. DWG to sketchup, then FBX to maya will convert much cleaner geometry. Plus any blocks will be converted to components in sketchup which will be converted to instance copies in maya. If you don't have sketchup you can always use the old 3ds to maya with the bonus tools 3ds import but i find it takes a lot more clean up that the latter method.

The lighting and modeling is looking good. The only thing that is really throwing them off is the card people.

Mental ray's only downfall is that it isnt verry easy to learn. Also out of the box certain things like blurry reflections can be a little on the slow side. Once you introduce custom shaders that people have wrote such as ctrl_shading by francescaluce over at CG talk blurry reflections are the fastest of any of the render engines ive seen. Irradiance mapping In vray is more advanced than Final Gather but is by no means faster. Acually since it does multiple passes it is considerably slower unless you go crazy with the settings in Mental ray. Also Mental ray is probably the best option for film work when GI/Raytracing is needed due to it's standalone package for renderfarms and its custom coding ability. Vray is a great render and what it does well it does better than probably any other package. If all you need is stills Vray is probably your best option due to its ease of use and overall great quality but mental ray is pretty close for that and it does a lot that vray doesnt.