Mental Ray 3.6 With Max 2008

[Dave Buckley]

Just a quick post on the new photographic exposure control in Max 2008, attached a 3 images showing the new photographic exposure compared with the logarithmic exposure from max 9, and also logarithmic in max 2008, it looks as though the problem of washed out textures has been eliminated with this new exposure control that is coming with max 2008. each image has exactly the same light setup, daylight system, mrsun mrsky, mr physicalsky, final gather draft preset. only thing to change is the exposure control. all exposure controls are set to an exterior daylight default. you be the judge, opinions most welcome, i shall keep testing with bitmaps and shaders to see how these affect the exposure etc

 

image 1 max 9 log exposure

image 2 max 2008 log exposure

image 3 max 2008 photographic exposure

 

sorry hard to tell with the difference with draft preset, maybe as the post evolves and i include more renders with shaders etc, the differences will become more noticeable (hopefully anyway : p)

[AJLynn]

Try a scene where log exposure would wash out the textures because of the gamma weirdness.

[kippu]

any more updates dave?

[MrCAD]

mental ray 3.6 with 2008 looks promising...how bout the speed improvements ? yeah..the gamma settings seem to be required ..the max 2008 demo for the interior lighting skylight portal looked convincing though..and it was nice to see how fast it rendered in the feature videos..

 

Meher

http://www.mr-cad.com

[WAcky]

I had a scene in max 9 that I hit a brick wall with. Too many polys and not enough memory. I had a go rendering with 2008 and it seems that it handles memory better and as seen in the demo vids it handles viewport speeds better. I will say that it isnt a magic solution. I cant push a whole lot more polys but a can push a few more. When i get the new quadcore ill do some speed tests.

 

I was under the impression that exposure controls are not related to the final gather map? Is log exp linked to final gather becuase i could have sworn you didnt have to rebuild your FG map to play around with exposure settings. The reason i bring this to attention is that with the couple of renders ive done with max2008, it seems that you have to rebuild the FG map if you play around with the new photographic exposure tool...

 

Can anyone confirm or correct this?

[pixelperfectg]

FG is not physically "linked" to any form of exposure control (never has been).

[joske]

hi daveb867

 

it would be better to test this with actual brick and wood textures

instead of just plain white and blue objects :

that way (if there is any) diffrences will show more obvious

 

i've never been a fan of log exp control because of the "washed out gamma" effect it had in max 6-8

 

our test show that the photographic exp control no longer suffers from this issue

we still can't get the same results in log exp contr.

altough it is getting very near to photogrphic in M2008 this time around

 

another diffr i noticed is that it is very hard to get the shadows and dark area's near to black in log exp c, again in photographic this is much better