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Mental Ray and HDRi workflow?


Jonathan
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There seems to be so many workarounds for IBL lighting in Mental Ray yet none appear to have the functionality, reliability and quality of VRay, particularly with exterior scenes. I currently use a Skylight through Environment Probe (for gamma correction) to a Environment/Background Switcher. Then I add a much reduced Daylight system for sunlight. It works ok but requires a ton of time experimenting with settings and is far from perfect. There surely must be a more efficient workaround in Mental Ray than this by now?

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Jeff Patton is the God of Mental Ray, along with Master Zapp. You'll find your soutions there.

 

http://jeffpatton.net/blog/

 

Zap's Tips: http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com/

 

Are you using MR Exposure Control? If not, you really need to. MR really wants to use exposure and if you don't use it, then you'll end up with really strange light settings.

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I think I've read all Jeff Pattons posts, and I am quite sure you won't be able to use pure IBL lightning in Mental Ray. iRay seems to be different beast, but needs a plugin to work properly anyway. I've seen beautiful IBL output in iRay from company named Delta Tracing. For pure Mental Ray, at most, you'll simply get really vague shadows and reflections.

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Thanks for the links Scott. Jeff and Zap certainly know MR. Yeah, I use MR Exposure Control all the time, infact I don't know how you could not use it:) Juraj, thanks, Delta Tracing's iRay work is really impressive. I had hoped I could stick it out with Mental Ray but perhaps it's time to jump ship?

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You can do IBL in mentalray, if your using 2012 and below its tricky as you have to ammend some of the mi files first, Check out out Hot Chips Thorsten Hartman's blog as he has a few scripts/tool that will help out with this. There are some string options which enable native IBL.

 

jhv

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Hi Justin, thanks. After looking at Thorston's great work again I have come to the same conclusion. It looks very fiddly and difficult and perhaps Im wrong but A&D shaders must be converted to TH_generic materials. I'd also be worried about how this tool could work with a render farm? Looks ideal for product/car viz work but can it translate to a arch-viz workflow?

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