chodney

Vray is certainly good for anything you can make in scanline. The materials have all the options, and more for more realistic metals, glass, woods, etc. having said that......my preference (after using vray for 2 years extensively) is now Mental Ray 3.5 or higher. The changes to the Arch & Design materials, and rendering speed improvements have sold us in our office. Mental Ray also seems easier to make convincing glass from exterior and interior renderings.

We figured that memory must be the issue. It actually cranks out the 200 strips pretty quickly, but then crashes when stictching together. we're going very large billboard to be mounted at a construction site 5.5' in the air. (overall board is 10' x 6' tall roughly). The art director that is in charge and actually making the board has specified 100 dpi as a must.....thus the huge pixel count. This is not an animation, but since it is multiple frames, i'd like to know if I'm using the correct Irradiance Map settings......everything came out stripey in the first test render.

We're having trouble getting a large rendering out in Viz 2008 and Vray 1.5 Final The overall image is 13000x10000, and we're using Irradiance Map 'add to current map' mode, then Light Cache from file. I tried this with a smaller scale test (4000 pixels) and it worked fine. It could be a memory issue, but the weird thing is I was able to do a bigger image this way before.....only problem was I forgot to save the irradiance map so it calculated different maps per image, and the overall ended up stripey. What happens now is it cranks through the blank frames no problem. As soon as it reaches a frame that has the building in it, it crashes and gives me an error of 'An unexpeted error has occurred'. Any body have any ideas or maybe suggestions of workflow to get this large an image out?

I have a fairly detailed model that is currently an Editable Poly. I need to get this into an IGS or .x_t parasolid filetype. For some reason, when I convert to Patch, then to Nurbs (to try to make it IGS) it takes forever, and the computer ultimately freezes. Is there an easier way, or perhaps a plugin that will do this conversion? thanks

It does work. you have to make sure you download the version for Max 9 from Chaosgroup. We had issues at work until we did this and reinstalled.

Under material setting 'Reflection Glossiness', set this to below 1.0. A little goes a long way with this

Here's a design study that brings up an issue we're trying to figure out. We're using VraySun,standard settings, VraySky (map1) in the Skylight slot and the Reflection map slot under the Renderer rollout, and VraySky (map2) under the standard VIZ Environment/Background tab. Now we're able to easily control the brightness and colors of the reflection on the glass by modifying the Vray Sky(map1). The problem is that we can't get a standard jpeg....i.e. a photo of the site across the street to show up with the Vrak Sky or physical cameras. How do you do this typical setup with VraySun,physical camera,etc.??

We are generating several renderings for multiple unit types on a 16 story condo tower in Portland, OR. The idea has come up to take 360 degree photos at the eye level of the 5th floor, and the 16th floor.......either through a crane, or a remote controlled balloon. Has anyone had any experience in this, and perhaps can suggest a company to do this?

thanks for the comments so far. the floor boards are correct....6" wide and you can scale them off the wall base (also 6"). we've had a real problem with the glass. I used a Vray material originally but had a problem making it reflect without having to turn the fog color and thickness way up, which of course made it look too dark. this material is just a standard material with a Vray map for the reflection. It's causing some serious color burn at the top of the windows, or wherever there is dark color on the background. any recommendations? images would help thanks

We're working on about 85 interior renderings for a local condo building. These will all be fully detailed, with furniture, and other entourage. As you can see, we're still working on modelling all the appliances, etc. but feel that the materials are done. I'd appreciate any critique or helpful comments you have on the lighting, materials, composition, or even post-processing ideas. thanks

Some people would disagree, but I never use Exposure Control with Mental Ray. I find that it counteracts a lot of the control settings I use to brighten the Global Illumination. Looking at your settings, I noticed a couple things I would change... 1) Your Global Decay Setting is really high.....especially for a bright exterior. I would put it down to about 0.7 or maybe even lower and that will solve a lot of your problems. 2) Your IES Sun has 'Shadow Map' as the shadow type. I would do either Raytraced Shadows or Mental Ray Shadow Map 3) When you start adding photon shaders to your materials, you'll get a lot better GI also. Could you post your material settings? good luck

Perhaps you have coplanar objects? That's often the problem for me when glass shows up like that.

Yeah, It definitely looks like you have Logarithmic Exposure Control on because the colors are so oversaturated. I'd also take a guess that there are no photon shaders set with the materials since everything seems flat. This also will make your renderings a lot slower, since Mental Ray is having to think hard about each photon refraction/reflection. Also, for interiors, I typically check the 'All objects generate and receive global illumination' thing. Just makes it easier to lighten the entire interior with fewer bounces. Could you post your material settings....specifically the white walls?

oops, sorry. I didn't see that this was a Maya discussion.....I'm on 3dStudio. Still, this should be under indiviual light settings somewhere. good luck

if you select your main light source (mrSpot, etc.), then go to the Mental Ray Indirect Illumination rollout, check Manual settings, and increase your Energy of that light. This will brighten the photons emitted this light. Also, you can decrease the decay of that light the same way. Increasing number of photons will also brighten the scene, but at a rendering time cost.