anyone there?

[3dred]

dear all,

 

is there anyone here who uses Maya for arch viz? If so, I'd love to chat with you. I'm working on a project and would love to bounce some ideas around.

 

Thanks for your time and response. Peace.

-tcb

[3dred]

nope, just me.

[derijones]

There's a few - but most use 3DMax or Viz. What sort of stuff are you doing?I use Maya, but don't have a huge amount of experience...

[3dred]

Deri,

 

sorry about the lag time, I have been out of the forums lately. I'm working on a room for a house that's being built by my client. The room is quite large and has some fairly ornate attributes and materials. Right now I'm working on lighting and am having some issues coming up with the most realistic options. I've never been the greatest with lighting and am facing a fairly steep learning curve. I'm using "Digital Lighting and Rendering" by Jeremy Birn, which is helpful, but am not finding any more patience than solutions. the kicker is that my version of Maya is old enough to not have a global illumination option.

 

Do you have any suggestions?

 

thanks for the consideration. Take care.

-travis

[Karlfucious]

I use Maya and I think that I am pretty fluent with it. As far as rendering goes Im not shure what options that you have but I typically use Mental Ray to do all of my renders but since you mentioned that you do not have a gi option I am assuming that you don't have mental ray. There are a few workarounds that you could use in the Maya default render to fake gi like a whole bunch of point lights spread out through out the room for fill light and mabey a spot light shining in the windows for the key light. For outdoor scenes you could try doing a search for gi joe mel script which gives some pretty good results.

[derijones]

Travis

I must admit that I haven't used the standard Maya render engine for anything other than basic animation stuff and use Mental Ray for arch viz work. There is a chapter in "MAya- Secrets of the pro's" ISBN: 0-7821-4055-6 (I think there are several editions of this - this one is around Maya 4.5 - I got it cheap in an online bargain store off Amazon) on internal lighting with the Maya renderer - looks like a lot of effort though - setting up bounce lights etc as Karl says.

If you can afford the upgrade to version 6.5 then it's worth it for Mental Ray, although even then it's tricky to get a good internal lighting of the sort of quality that people are producing in VRAY, but at least there are some better resources around now to learn how to set it up. I've yet to do an internal render I'm happy with in MR. I'm also looking at Maxwell - haven't had a real chance to play with it yet, but it looks promising.

Cheers

Deri

[3dred]

Mr. Fucius and Mr Jones,

 

thanks for the feedback, gents. I must say, having my version of Maya 6 sitting on the floor behind me is a wee tough, considering I don't have it on my computer yet - there's my biggest gi blockage. I'll respond in turn to you both.

 

Fucius: thanks for the skininy on imitation of light. I'll give both the multi-points paired with the spot light and then the gi joe mel a whirl. I've just started to dig for the gi joe script, and am hoping to be reunited with some of my old cheesey cartoon companions in the process. These techinques are good to know about, and knowing is half the battle. Gracias.

 

Deri: Good to hear back from you. You mentioned that VRay offers the best results for you - what's VRay? I do apologise, to you both, I'm only a rookie in many of these areas. What's Maxwell?

 

Are there any 3rd party gems out there that shine better than others? I found a dandy the other day, but I've since forgotten the name of it. The package, if I remember correctly, ran about $1500. I'm hoping to find a less expensive solution, but I'll explore what I must. I'll hopefully be able to trod the ray of least resistance.

 

Are either of you planning on making it to LA for SIGGRAPH? I'm considering it, but I'd like to know there will be a real showing of our type before I commit to another one of these. I've been 4 itmes before and they've diminished in flare each time. The last one I went to (two years agao, in San Diego) was flat except for the Animation Theater.

 

Happy Trails.

-travis

[Karlfucious]

Maxwell Render Is another really good option but its got a few problems with it. First off is that its really SLOW. Most of the renders that you see on their site or here probably have taken an upwards of 10 hours or so to get it up to that level so animations are kind of out of the question. Also It isnt really that implimented into Maya quite as good yet such as It cant use any Maya hypershade nodes which can be kind of a pain in the ass when it comes to texture placement. For instance it has no Place 2d texture nodes so you have to go in manualy and scale up your uv coordinates to get the level of repeats that you want. Another gripe of mine is that it renders out your alpha channel into a seperate file which makes compositing a little more of a pain but the way that ion and a few bugs Maxwell seems to be promising. Plus if you act fast its only $395 untill June 15 i think. http://www.maxwellrender.com/

[derijones]

Travis

VRAY is the render engine that people use to produce most of the stunning internals you see on the galleries here. I know a tool is only as good as it's user, but even the best folks on here seem to have to put in more effort to get Mental Ray to produce really stunning results. I don't think it's currently available for Maya (though both VRAY and Final Render are both working on solutions, I believe). The other alternative is Turtle - I tried the download demo and was pretty impressed by the speed and nice shadows, but really ran out of time to give it a full evaluation -I'd be very interested in hearing people's take on it.

I agree with Karl - Maxwell is slow and the interface with Maya is clunky at the moment, but as it is still an alpha, we can make allowances (just hope that it does come up with the goods - otherwise there's gonna be a heap of unhappy campers out there who have forked out $400 or whatever!! - it has the ring of a good scam, except the folks at Next Limit seem very genuine!)

As I say, several of the third party render engine people are putting together solutions for Maya - hopefully that will mean we have access to the same toolbox as MAX people in the coming few months.

I've decided to put the effort in to learning Mental Ray and hang on for version 7 and see what happens with Maxwell - look at the Alias community website, CGnetworks.com and highend3d.com as well as for softimage XSI and Max MR tutorials - you can generally decipher what corresponds to the relevant Maya bit after a while. Just be prepared for a heap of screen staring - the patience of a saint is definitely an assett in this gig!

LA - I wish - I'd be happy to escape to the local pub even at the moment - I have a gale force wind and pouring rain whirling arond my house - the joys of Wales in the summer!

Cheers

Deri

[Karlfucious]

I agree that Vray is an awesome render engine and produces stunning results. And Im waiting for it to be released for Maya to test it out for my self but from what I understand is that Its more of a push button renderer meaning that there is a make pretty button. Not that there is anything wrong with that but when it comes to doing stuff thats out of the norm people using the make pretty button will be lost. Mental Ray is definatly able to produce even better images than vray but only if the person using it really knows it well. With Mental Ray you cant really just tell it that you want photo real. You have to tune and then tune some more. At face value Mental Ray isn't much better than Maya's default renderer but when you start getting into the more advanced aspects of it such as gi,final gather,displacements, and using custom shaders Mental Ray is extreamly powerfull.