Jump (back!) to Mental Ray ?

[landrvr1]

I render 3 or 4 animations a month using MR...not a single split second flicker in any of them.

 

 

Examples or they never happened.

[landrvr1]

What I do find amusing is that you Mental Ray guys say the same with with EVERY new release: "It's so much easier now!"

 

So then I'll eagerly crack open whatever new version it happens to be, and within 2 hours I'm ready to scratch out my eyeballs with a rusty fork and pick the meat out of my brainpan as well for good measure.

 

In many ways it's like Charlie Brown, Lucy, and the football. This time I'm REALLY GOING TO KICK THAT BALL!

(apologies if that analogy is lost on some folks)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ps. Okay, I did just read Tom's review of the new MR. Who knows? Maybe this really is a marked improvement?

Edited November 18, 2009 by landrvr1

[mattclinch]

What I do find amusing is that you Mental Ray guys say the same with with EVERY new release: "It's so much easier now!"

 

So then I'll eagerly crack open whatever new version it happens to be, and within 2 hours I'm ready to scratch out my eyeballs with a rusty fork and pick the meat out of my brainpan as well for good measure.

 

In many ways it's like Charlie Brown, Lucy, and the football. This time I'm REALLY GOING TO KICK THAT BALL!

(apologies if that analogy is lost on some folks)

 

 

What exactly are the difficulties you have that result in the eye scratching behaviour? Perhaps some of the MR people on this forum might be able to point you in the direction of where you are going wrong and show you just how easy it is to use.?

[thorsten hartmann]

sorry but i think vray & mental ray render the same quality in the same time. You need only the knowledge. Vray is at this time much better integrate in 3dsmax as mental ray. But when you use Photo Studio & Shader Utilities is mental ray much better intergrate in 3dsmax as vray.

 

look this video about Photo Studio and the Datasetmanagement:

[landrvr1]

What exactly are the difficulties you have that result in the eye scratching behaviour? Perhaps some of the MR people on this forum might be able to point you in the direction of where you are going wrong and show you just how easy it is to use.?

 

I stopped even trying awhile back. Never bothered with 2009, let alone the new 2010. There's always this promise of enormous improvements in MR, but they never really materialize. All that really happens is minor upgrades.

 

 

But let's really get down to serious business now, shall we? Enough of this platform fanboy stuff, lol. I only have one question, and one question only:

 

WILL MY WORKFLOW/RENDERTIMES/ANIMATIONTIMES BE SIGNIFICANTLY IMPROVED IF I SWITCH OVER TO MR2010? IS THE RENDER ENGINE SIGNIFICANTLY SUPERIOR TO VRAY'S?

 

Everything else is totally and utterly irrelevant. It's like I post in this very forum whenever there's word of a brand new VRay build: Unless you can cut my preCalc times and render times in half, it's all just FX upgrade crap. Atmospheric lighting. Zzzzzz. Toons. Zzzzzz. Promises of new animation presets/techniques/whatever that will help reduce flicker are usually just rubbish. Improved displacement mapping!!!!! FAIL. Smoke and mirrors to what we are all really after: SPEED.

 

It's a similar issue in switching to a new platform like MR.

 

*SPEED RULES*.

 

Let's say that an animation sequence takes 8 hours to render using VRay and my farm. How much will the new MR2010 reduce that and still get me the quality I need? If it's by half, I'm going to burn my copy and VRay and post it on YouTube for all you guys to see. If it reduces it down to 5 hours, I'll still burn my copy but may not bother to videotape the fun. If it reduces it down to 6 or 7 hours, I'm losing interest fast. If it doesn't really reduce my rendertimes than I'm going to have to label this as a FAIL.

 

When someone says that setting up an animation in MR compared to VRay is 'child's play', that gets me curious. It gets me more cautious than curious, however. Again, HOW MUCH MORE EASIER? Like, ONE BUTTON CLICK EASIER? No? OOoooookaaaay. How much easier? Cut my setup time literally in half? You've got my attention. Anything less is a FAIL.

 

*shrug* Dunno. I've got 4 or 5 guys I work with that are fairly skilled on both VRay and MR (2009). Without exception they say the same thing: MR isn't going to get your project done any faster. Has this changed with 2010? Will it REALLY help me get my crap done faster? Is there that much of an improvement in workflow that it's now superior to VRay? You see, I judge a platform's worth almost soley on this criteria:

 

WILL IT HELP ME GET MY CRAP DONE FASTER?

 

Everything else like cool new shaders and fire and toon and God-Like displacement is a distant, distant second.

 

ps. Before any of you say, 'But speed isn't the only thing that makes a platform great', just stop.

[amer abidi]

What exactly are the difficulties you have that result in the eye scratching behaviour? Perhaps some of the MR people on this forum might be able to point you in the direction of where you are going wrong and show you just how easy it is to use.?

 

Thanks Matt, couldn't have possibly put it in a more eloquent manner.

[amer abidi]

I only have one question, and one question only:

 

WILL MY WORKFLOW/RENDERTIMES/ANIMATIONTIMES BE SIGNIFICANTLY IMPROVED IF I SWITCH OVER TO MR2010? IS THE RENDER ENGINE SIGNIFICANTLY SUPERIOR TO VRAY'S?

 

In my humble experience, and in my specific workflow (which ive described earlier involving multiple users/platforms, the answer is YES.

 

When someone says that setting up an animation in MR compared to VRay is 'child's play', that gets me curious. It gets me more cautious than curious, however. Again, HOW MUCH MORE EASIER? Like, ONE BUTTON CLICK EASIER? No? OOoooookaaaay. How much easier? Cut my setup time literally in half? You've got my attention. Anything less is a FAIL.

 

Yes, ONE button click.

"Generate Photon Map file now" Button, no joke.

 

WILL IT HELP ME GET MY CRAP DONE FASTER?

 

 

Depends how crap it is. lol. no seriously, you can't say Will it be faster than Vray, i mean that is such a novice question. There are SO MANY things you have to take into consideration. Its like a guy giving up on a project because his computer crashes everytime he hits render. HE DOESN'T KNOW WHAT THE BUTTON REALLY DOES, and that's why his computer crashes! There are ways around everything... I openly admited that i think Vray is more Advanced than MR, but MR is MUCH easier to use and get reliable results than Vray. Plus its BUILT-INTO max, which to me is a HUGE thing.

 

peace.

[landrvr1]

you can't say Will it be faster than Vray, i mean that is such a novice question. There are SO MANY things you have to take into consideration.

 

lol. It's not a novice question. In fact, it's the most important and intelligent question of all if one is seriously thinking about changing platforms.

 

Of course there are a thousand things to take into consideration. Problem is, it's all too easy to get lost down that rabbit hole. You'll never get out. Quite simply, there should be a baseline point of comparison that gets you as close to apples-to-apples as possible. What is that baseline? An interior scene and an exterior scene, both rendered out by someone equally as skilled on both VRay and MR? That's the start of a good baseline comparison. Problem is, to my knowledge it doesn't exist. Tom L. is a friggin genius in this field. I'm hard pressed to think of someone more talented, in fact. If he says the new MR is worth checking out, there's probably something to it. That's a far cry, however, from a true platform-to-platform showdown. If it's been done, in a legit way other than 'Wow the new MR is really much easier to use', just point the way.

 

Both VRay and MR can be optimized for cranking out renderings/animations in a 'relatively' fast way. Both can be customized quite a bit in all manner of ways. There's no reason to suggest that a baseline comparison between the two isn't possible; regardless of an individual's quirks or whatever in workflow.

 

 

Having said all this, my interest is definitely peaked in MR2010. And, lo and behold, I just loaded up 2010 last week. Hmm.

[amer abidi]

well i'm gonna say it again, im still on 2009 So my belief in MR is hardocre, and not dependant on these new "attractions".

 

Thinking of downloading the trial version of 2010 next week if things around the office slow down a bit (fingers crossed).

 

MR is definitely worth checking out (to say the least). Good luck to you Scott

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Keep in mind, becoming a pro in a new render engine typically takes about 1 year of using that engine full time. Sure, you can the jist of how it works in a couple of days, but to really know the ins and outs of how to make things efficient takes experience and use.

 

Mayb this is just my opinion, but

[Scott Schroeder]

I'm currently learning MR after using Vray for 5 years. I've got to say that so far MR lacks the ultimate speed tweaks that Vray has. MR is a great render if you know how to use it. I've seen awful images with Vray and I've seen great images with Vray, the same applies for MR.

 

I will say that I do like the MR arch and Pro materials, but I still prefer the Vray materials if I am going to create custom from-scratch materials. However, it is just a learning curve, but the MR material is still falling short on the UI.

 

MR also lacks general support. Where are the universal settings like Vlado posted for Vray? Sure, the universal settings aren't perfect but they are start. The biggest pain in my ass with learning MR was finding settings support that wasn't written by a 12 year old. I prefer Vray's board over anything I have found for MR, including the lamrug and Mental Images boards. I like the fact that Vlado who develops Vray is active on his boards.

 

I like the Vray lights over the MR ones. I liked being able to use a plane light without it having to be a photometric light. The Vray lights also have a lot more control over them.

 

The two other gripes is that I don't always want to upgrade to a new Max just to get the new MR. And MR licensing is a royal pain when it is per physical CPU and Vray is per computer. Plus Vray comes with 10 and MR comes with 5.

 

Right now, my biggest gripe is speed vs quality in MR. I'm still trying to find the sweet spot. Next thing I am looking at is iRay versus Vray's real time.

[WAcky]

A&D materials are supported in Vray and there was talk of an sp3 update that was supposed to include support for promaterials but that doesn't seem to have happened.

 

The beauty of Vray is if you (for some reason) want promaterial support. Just go on the chaos forums and make some noise and it will probably be in the next update.

[Justin Hunt]

I have to question vrays support of A&D, yes it will render them but (this is something I will have to look into further) I still dont think it supports all the features, in particular Cut-out maps.

 

One of the biggest speed/workflow improvments in 2010 is the new "Calculate FG from points along the camera path" feature.

 

It has shaved hours, yes hours, off the FG calculation time when doing animatons. The way it displays all the frames all at once during calculation is very handy for checking lighting through out the animation. Without the need to re-render Nth frames to check.

 

As crap as they are, RPC's now work better with mr than Vray.

 

jhv

[thorsten hartmann]

a important reason for me to use mental ray is, i can wrote my pro-materials, for example the TH-Materials, with a lot of more Functions and other Shader (Porcelain SSS, Fabric, Water for Vue ....). Chaos Group must every time update Vray, when we mental ray user write a new Pro-Materials. That is funny.

Edited November 18, 2009 by thorsten hartmann

[WAcky]

Hey Justin.

 

Yeah after a quick test it does appear that cutout maps don't work. The FG calculation you mentioned sounds interesting. I've never even done an animation with Vray but I'm pretty sure vray has a simmilar feature. There is also an irradiance map viewer utility which lets you check your GI map but then again I could be completely wrong about all this, like I said I've never done any animation.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Hey Justin.

 

Yeah after a quick test it does appear that cutout maps don't work. The FG calculation you mentioned sounds interesting. I've never even done an animation with Vray but I'm pretty sure vray has a simmilar feature. There is also an irradiance map viewer utility which lets you check your GI map but then again I could be completely wrong about all this, like I said I've never done any animation.

 

The new FG calculation method displays the calculation of frames along a path at the same time. Meaning, if you have 9 calculation points, all the caculation points are being caculated on the screen simultaneously. Not one after the other.

[WAcky]

Ah ok. Well you could use photon mapping if you wanted to but yeah I don't know if anyone does.

[Justin Hunt]

I use photon & FG most of the time, its fast, very fast. Basic guide is if you need more that 3 FG bounces its time for photons. 50 bounce photons is quicker and more detailed than a 3 bounce fg solution.

 

jhv

[WAcky]

Just found that there is actually a "use camera path" option for the light cache GI engine.

[kid84]

erm... guys, what is FG and what is A&D???

dont quite understand.

is it with vray or with MR? i nvr use MR before.

[thorsten hartmann]

HI

 

FG= Final Gathering ( indirect illumination)

A&D = Arch & Design ( Material Shader )

 

the helpfile of mental ray is very good.

 

mfg

hot chip

[kid84]

HI

 

FG= Final Gathering ( indirect illumination)

A&D = Arch & Design ( Material Shader )

 

the helpfile of mental ray is very good.

 

mfg

hot chip

oh.. thanks a lot.

[Spacelord]

a important reason for me to use mental ray is, i can wrote my pro-materials, for example the TH-Materials, with a lot of more Functions and other Shader (Porcelain SSS, Fabric, Water for Vue ....). Chaos Group must every time update Vray, when we mental ray user write a new Pro-Materials. That is funny.

 

Hi Thorsten,

Thats definitely a good reason, if you have the techinical know how.

I'm a Mental Ray user and I find it a pain to have to wait for autodesk to release another 3dsmax to get the latest mental ray version. Where as Vray seem to release point releases all the time and there free.

So having to pay the price of 3dsmax subscription to get the latest version of Mental Ray is a pain and then you might not even get a worth while update.

 

cheers

[thorsten hartmann]

Hi Spacelord,

 

you are right, the Service of Chaos Group is much better as the mental ray developer-team from autodesk. It is true that Chaos Group bring all the time a new updates, but for me to many Updates. When i have a problem with mental ray, i write or a find a Shader for my prolbem. When i have the Problem in Vray, i must wait of the Update.

 

PS: Autodesk must fire the technical director of the developer team and than is the sun shining.