Question?...radiosity,mentalray,vray,etc

[Acheng]

hi,

 

lately, i noticed many people on this forum started to put radiosity aside. i found that many will spend some money to buy other renderer plugins such vray etc rather than keep using radiosity. for Max 6 user, many will jump to mental ray for rendering. is it mean that radiosity is not capable or not worthly to use. what do you guys think?

[John Dollus]

Personally, I think it is a 'grass is greener' mentality. Rendering engines will always change (some just go away). I was given a Vray interior that was taking 2 hours to render by a very skilled vray artist and switched it over to native Max advanced lighting with a rendertime of 20 mins (including all pre-processing time) and you couldn't tell much of a difference.

 

I happen to like working with MentalRay as I do a lot of animation work and the details seem to be sharper to me on moving images. For still images, I still use Lightscape for my own work simply because I can get predictable results with my eyes closed in that app. but that's more from familiarity than it is a dedication to the math.

 

With Max7, I have read some very promising things about the lighting improvements which may lead me to an all MentalRay toolset but the jury is way out on that one.

 

Oh, for the record, I use Vray daily and don't have a problem with it at all. The above example was only one situation and should not be taken as a literal comment on the performance of renderer a vs. b

[Christopher Nichols]

Radiosity and Raytracing both have their benefits and disadvantages when it comes to GI. I will not list them as for this response, as it all depends on projects and SO many other factors. The key to using a raytracing method is to have a rendering engine that will be good and fast... mentalray, Vray, Brazil, etc... If you are using one of these, you gain an additional benefit that scanline rendering has a harder time with and that is... well... raytracing. Basically you will benefit in terms of reflections, refraction, glossy effects, raytrace shadows, area lights, etc... These type of effects are much more expensive when doing them in a scanline rendering.

 

On the other hand, if you are doing a game level, radiosity is great because by its very nature it bakes the lighting into the geometry. That is more difficult (although still possible) with raytracing GI.

[Devin Johnston]

I was a big user of Max radiosity until I got Final Render, now I can't imagine going back to radiosity. The main reason I like FR so much is the relativley easy setup, and the color fastness of the materials. A big reason we swithched was because when doing any large scene with radiosity the calculation time and render time was just to expensive. I did a test between radiosity and Final Render on a project that I already rendered using max radiosity. The first time I did the project with radiosity it took about 60 hours to compleat it. The same project using final render took 35 hours!

[mbr]

I'll second the final render vote. One draw back is the price of mental ray licenses, that, and if you use them it will not work with rpcs. If you have a render farm, the price of the MR licenses will most likely cost as much as the entire farm! That's a pretty big obstacle unless you are doing HUGE projects and love MR.

[tcorbett]

Too often I find that both radiosity and MR give me realistic results, but that realistic results are not what I want.

 

Long live fakeosity!