Mentalray 3.5

[manta]

Well I decided to give MR 3.5 a try, and I must say its pretty easy to use, this is an old scene that I just converted the materials to MR's new shaders, I'm sure it could be better, but I only worked on the lighting and materials for an hour or so...in any case I think Vray finally has some competition...

[Justin Hunt]

I hope by the end of this thread we will covert you back to Mentalray;) (sorry I had to do it in retaliation it the umteen times Vray users have hijacked Mentalray threads)

 

Good start, now lets get into the nitty gritty

 

Are you using Final gather?

 

and what type of lights are you using for the lamps, the shadows seem too hard. Change them to MROmni's with raytraced shadows and a larger radius.

Turn off shadow casting for the lamp shades.

 

 

JHV

[manta]

I knew you would be happy Justin, I did have some trouble with a couple things, namely the lamp shades, I think I was using the sss physical shader, I'm not sure, there are three sss shaders it was kind of confusing, and the other thing was the shadows, they are raytrace with area shadows, didn't reall play around with it all that much, Justin you say turn off shadow casting for the lamps, but I've got a lamp right in front of me on my desk, and its throwing light out the top and bottom, casting a shadow in the middle, how will I get that effect without faking it, oh and yes I'm using FG at medium settings...

 

Thanx,

Bill

[Justin Hunt]

By turning off shadow casting it will allow fg samples to pass through the lamp shade. I nice trick to avoid the headacke of translucency.

 

Place an MRarea omni inside the lamp and squash the falloff with a non-uniform scale so the fall off is eliptical. This way the light streangth is stronget up and down and weaker through the middle.

 

Another trick is to hide the lampshade during the FG calculation, freeze the FG and turn the lampshade back on. Rerender.

 

The lampshade will still be illuminated by the direct light, just not the secondary light. This way you can keep the shadow casting on for the lampshade.

 

I did this for these renders, I hid all glass,sail, railings and anything else that would contibute anything significant to the bouced light.I then did the FG calcs at half the resolution. Unhid everything, froze the FG and rendered to full size. The scene is only light by a MR sun/Sky system and an output shader on a flat plane placed inside the shops. The FG pass too 15 minutes at 1500 tall and the final took 25 minutes at 3000 tall.

 

Have you gone through the FG tutorial that ships with Max9? its a good expination of the settings

 

Medium is too high, start with Low, density at 0.8, FGRays 150 and interperlate 30. To increase detail rasie the density and FGRays. To smooth out artifacts increase the interporlate. Keep bounces at 1 until you ar happy with the results then increase to 2, anything above 5 is too slow. The other important settings is the Trace Depth. Set max depth to 20 (more if needed) and the max reflect and refract to something suitable, ie if there are alot of glossies and transparent surfaces raise these, but not too high. The sum of the two sould be lower than the Max Depth.

 

The other thing that can really slow a render down is the noise filtering, anything above "Standard" is very slow.

 

JHV

[Justin Hunt]

Just to better illistrate the differences between hiding the lamp shade and using Translucency

 

By hiding the lampshade the FG samples are distributed further and more evenly, producing a brighter image.

 

By using Tranclucency the FG samples are tinted by the orange colour of the tranclucency and the distribution is less even, producing a darker image

 

In both the lampshade is casting shadows, so I stand corrected on that point. As you can see the shadow shape is the same in both.

 

You decide which methode is most usefull

 

I have included the Max9 file

 

JHV

[manta]

Thanx Justin, I'll give it A try...

[cloaked_spectre]

what i've discovered in MR 3.5(with my little experience), is that final gather has been "turbo-charged" and the render pass is the dog now (?)

my last few renders seem to have unusually long render times.....it could just be that i'm getting spoiled with the new speedier aspects.....

[mahorela]

I hope by the end of this thread we will covert you back to Mentalray;) (sorry I had to do it in retaliation it the umteen times Vray users have hijacked Mentalray threads)

JHV

 

come back to the dark side Manta...........hahahaha:p