How to speed up Mentalray 101?

[Michael Earley]

I have been working with vray for some time with ok results. I have just started a new project and was searching for help about animation in this forum and ran across a thread that said that someone knew someone who had a friend who had rendered a model in vray taking 2 hours and they tried it in mentalral and took 20 min.. I was stuck. thought what the heck.. a new mentalray user is born. It rocks, the output is execlent in 1/5 the time on this model just using the default settings. Now here is where I get greedy. Are there any speed tweeks that are generaly known? I will learn the product as soon as I have a moment.. but are there any shorthcuts?

thanks in advance.

Michael

 

This was done in about 10 min as opposed to 1 hour plus in vray and did not look half as good. I still have to play with the lighting and would welcome any comments.

[Michael Earley]

Oh well .. short lived glory... just discovered cannot use rpc's with mr I promised walking people. Is there any word from archvision when the will have a plugin for mr?

thanks

michael

[manta]

That scene took over an hour to render with Vray ???

 

I've rendered 10 million polygons (trees, buildings, cars, people etc ) in one scene, and it didn't take an hour...

 

That looks like a pretty simple scene, are you sure you are using it right ?

[Chris_T]

You could get around that by rendering your people in a separate pass using the scanline renderer. Something along the lines of saving a copy of your scene and assigning a Matte material to everything, putting the RPC people in there, setting the original MR animation as a screen environment and render from the same camera.

 

Reflection and transparency overlapping/interaction with the RPC people would be tricky using this method, but there's probably ways. If that test render is anything to go by, however, there wouldn't be a whole lot of people being reflected or overlapped by translucent objects.

 

--Edit--

Oh, as for speeding up Mental ray whilst getting decent antialiasing, these sampling settings seem to work well:

 

(in the Renderer tab of the Render Scene dialog when MR is the active renderer):

Samples per Pixel: Min=1 Max=16

Contrast: Spatial: RGBA all = 0.1

[Michael Earley]

Thanks chris, I think that all the seperate rendering and post work would kill me in time, I guess it is back to vray for this project and learn mr for next time.

thanks for the information.

[Brolloks]

I have to agree with manta. I think you need to tweak your vray settings. Although it's possible to set vray to render for hours/frame you can tweak the settings and not see a marked difference and render that same image in 10min or less.

 

Check your GI settings ... if you used it.