What's the story with Mental Ray?

[Lightning]

After reading today's article about Mental Ray and seeing all the excitement about the incorporation of MR in 3DS Max 6 and MAYA 5 I began to wonder:

What is all the excitement about?

Although I'm familiar with this product for quite some time in relation to Max (Ver. 2.1), it doesn't seem to be very popular with the architectural community as it reflects from this website. I have very little experience with the older version, but does the current version (3.2) is so much better than the 3rd party renderers that are popular? Is it faster? Does it give more photorealistic results?

[mbr]

From all that I've read, MR's strengths lie in it's flexibility. The shaders/materials can be coded for specific purposes. This is a huge benefit for Hollywood, but for arhc viz, it's overkill.

The disadvantage, at least from my point of view, is the cost down the road. With the 3rd party renderers, you can purchase more licenses for relatively small amounts, but with MR it's several thousands, making network renderering outrageous.

Now that Max 6 will have it, most we'll have to see how things play out.

[Jeff Mottle]

Indeed I too will be very curious to see how much MR get integrated into the Arch Viz industry. I asked both Brazil and Vray about their thoughts on wheter or not they felt that with MR being adopted they would see a drop in sales and both responded no. While MR is definetly a powerful app, its not easy to learn and it's actually quite comlex, especially if you delve into the world of writting shaders. From what I understand there are still things that each will be able to do better, so it will interesting to see which the public thinks will meet their needs the most.

 

In regards to network renderngs, yes that will probably be a sticking point for sure. If you had 5 copies of MAX you would be able to use BackBurner to take advantage of those 5 MR licences as long as they were not being used. However, if you wanted to do true bucket rendering you would still require additional MR licenses at what I'm guessing will fall in the $500-2000 range per licence. SI had a $500 per licence sale a while back, but I suspect that this will not be the going rate from Discreet, at least not over the long term. You can always hope for a MR sale.

 

Long term however, unless you have the in house expertise to deal with MR and the $$$ to set up a decent farm (assuming you need one) then I still think Vray and Brazil will be used more often for animations. However, there might be a good chance that MR get's used for stills. The look is VERY good (as good and better than Lightscape IMHO) and it can be used in conjunction with the new Archtectural MAterials which are born of Lightscape. I might add that this is the ONLY thing now that you can truly say is born of Lightscape, becuase it uses many of the same alogorthms. The radiosity however is not, which is unfourtunately not what 99% of the rest of the uneducated media report.

[Lightning]

Thanks for an educated answer!

[kunstraum.tv]

i worked with MR for max for several years and with softimage XSI. SI still integrats MR the best way. MR is a very, very powerfull tool with lot of features BUT it is still very very slow and expensive. and it is very complex if you want the full power of MR. you have mentioned the shader. that´s a great advantage if you want to go very deep into the MR stuff. but even vray has now the option to program your own shader and in 1.1 there will be much more options to it. i nearly worked with all renderers and i have to say that vray gives me the best balance between quality and speed. and when you tweak vray the right way, you can produce the same quality as MR (i think it´s the same for brazil). of course the speed goes down then, but it´s possible !! i don´t know how MR will fit in max 6, but i can´t imagine that it will be very different to what´s possible in SI with MR now. and for architectural renderings that´s not enough imho. look at the big animation offices in berlin (archimation, B+F). they all work with SI and MR and they are not very satisfied with it. i talked to them several times and they mentioned that to me. they don´t even turn on gi in most of the pictures because of the rendertime. for the gi-stuff they often switch to lightscape. MR is very powerfull in the filmindustry (like renderman), but for for "our" stuff i think it´s still the wrong tool. i´m very glad i have switched from lightscape to vray and remember, vray is a very young product....imagine what will be possible in the future. i can´t see such improvements at MR over the years. MR was the basic and all the "new" renderers (vray, brazil, fR) learnt from MR and they are on the best way to beat MR. but it´s just my opinion and experience.

 

sorry for my humbling english, i´m very tired...too much work )

[Pierre-Felix Breton]

Originally posted by mbr:

The shaders/materials can be coded for specific purposes. This is a huge benefit for Hollywood, but for arhc viz, it's overkill.

Hi!

 

I participated in the development of Max 6 and into the mental ray integration.

 

There are a couple things that can make the difference for design viz customers with this release:

 

1- The integration is a lot different than what it was in the past: the renderer supports seamlessly 98% of the regular max features.

 

Mental ray can render IES lights, IES area/linear lights, IES and Standard Sky, recognizes the Log exposure control, renders the regular Max materials and maps (raytrace, standard, checker, bricks, rgb multiply etc..) and even better, it also renders the new Architectural Material we added to Max 6.

 

It also supports the rendering settings, recognize by layer render settings, etc.

 

2- Mental ray is a true raytracer. The main strenghts are in the reflections/refractions calculations: a little bit like Lightscape is and a lot faster than the Max renderer to accomplish theses tasks.

 

This is perfect for Architectural scenes with glass, steel, ceramic etc.

 

So from this perspective, mental ray is really a good tool for design viz rendering and not only applies to Hollywood renderings with custom shaders etc...

 

Hope this helps,

[schmoron13]

Originally posted by Pierre-Felix Breton:

quote:

---

Originally posted by mbr:

The shaders/materials can be coded for specific purposes. This is a huge benefit for Hollywood, but for arhc viz, it's overkill.

Hi!

 

I participated in the development of Max 6 and into the mental ray integration.

 

There are a couple things that can make the difference for design viz customers with this release:

 

1- The integration is a lot different than what it was in the past: the renderer supports seamlessly 98% of the regular max features.

 

Mental ray can render IES lights, IES area/linear lights, IES and Standard Sky, recognizes the Log exposure control, renders the regular Max materials and maps (raytrace, standard, checker, bricks, rgb multiply etc..) and even better, it also renders the new Architectural Material we added to Max 6.

 

It also supports the rendering settings, recognize by layer render settings, etc.

 

2- Mental ray is a true raytracer. The main strenghts are in the reflections/refractions calculations: a little bit like Lightscape is and a lot faster than the Max renderer to accomplish theses tasks.

 

This is perfect for Architectural scenes with glass, steel, ceramic etc.

 

So from this perspective, mental ray is really a good tool for design viz rendering and not only applies to Hollywood renderings with custom shaders etc...

 

Hope this helps, I'm a little confused (and naive):

Won't Brazil and vray support the arch material, and the other new features of max 6? and I thought brazil had the best caustic calculations?

[Pierre-Felix Breton]

Won't Brazil and vray support the arch material, and the other new features of max 6? and I thought brazil had the best caustic calculations?

Having 3rd party renderers supporting all our shaders (like the new Architectural material in Max 6) is tricky. Right now, they will not support them. I guess this is more a business decision than a technical problem (and I can't really give the business reasons - only the technical ones)

 

Allowing them to support all our materials and lights is be the equivalent of given them our code for them.

 

For example, the Architectural material is a shader that calculates reflections and falloffs based on physical models. This material is the fruit of years of researches and testing (this exactly what you have in Lightscape).

 

Giving away the code to 3rd party renderers may cause issues on the business side.

 

Is it the right thing to do?, is it wrong, I really don't know.

 

As for mental ray, we could re-use all our code to make mental ray "understanding" theses materials and lights without business issues since we ship it in the box.

 

As for the "better caustics" comment, I assume this is a very subjective one...

 

Regards,

[Pierre-Felix Breton]

but I think it is safe to assume that they will not support the material, at least in the early days of max 6.

Hi!

 

Let me revise what I said previously.

 

We tested Vray internally on Max 6 (thanks to Alex B from Discreet) with the new Architectural Material and it worked fine: reflections, bumps, refractions etc rendered ok.

 

So we can safely assume the opposite of what I said:

 

The Architectural material will work fine with the 3rd party renderers - if the renderer supports what we call in the MAX SDK the "shade context" - and most renderers are already supporting that "feature".

 

If they don't, the material will probably render black.

 

If the renderer is not a plugin but external to Max, like mental ray or Render Man, then they need to get "our" code and re-implement a "copy" of the material in their own shaders.

 

Sorry for the confusion,

[Sawyer]

Thank you Pierre for being so forth coming & sharing this info. Very cool thing to do.

[schmoron13]

yeah thanks. It's awesome to hear this news straight from the source!!!

 

 

I have a side question about liscensing for 6 (not really on topic, but in a way it still is I spose? )

 

ok, when upgrading, am I buying a new liscense or am I just getting an upgrade. By this I mean, can I sell my older copy or do I need previous versions (5, 4.2, etc) to keep my registration?

 

I know that Propellorhead (makers of Reason) require the purchaser to hold the original version, but autocad for instance let's you sell older copies of their programs and give up your liscense without losing the liscense to the newer softer you might own...anyone know?

[DapperDanJelly]

I read that you can buy a licence from some 1 but Autodesk doesn't recognize you -> you cannot upgrade from a previous licence if it's not originally yours.

 

I suppose it's the same for Max.