Mr 3.4

[nisus]

Hi all,

 

Does anyone knows MORE than just this text from Autodesks supscription page?

mental ray 3.4

 

 

With built-in access to the most current version of mental ray, design visualization and visual effects customers will be able to run medium-sized render farms right out of the box. mental ray 3.4 delivers numerous optimizations, including faster final gathering performance, double precision computation for ray tracing and fast rasterization for first-generation rays.

 

Does it mean we don't need stand-alone MR-licenses anymore? Any specifications on the limitations of a 'medium-sized render farm'???

 

rgds

 

nisus

[DennisHolland]

As far as I know from info at 3dstudio.nl the new version of mentalray inside Max 7.5 comes with 8 License/CPU so that is as far as medium sized renderfarms goes.

[nisus]

Hi Dennis,

 

8 lic/cpu or per max-license??

Does this also work for standalone-MR versions, i.e. 8cpus per MR-license?

 

Do you know whether that version is full working or not? My collegues presumes one image can be rendered on 8 cpu's/computers, but not 8 images on 8 machines... So basicly, is it only DBR-network rendering or full???

Got a clue on this?

 

What is the advantage of having stand-alone MR-licenses? (we own 3 besides our max licenses...)

 

rgds

 

nisus

[nisus]

btw Dennis:

Even voorstellen?

Priestermedia is een designstudio, bied high-end 3D visualisatie oplossingen voor architecten

--> biedT

 

,-)

 

nisus

[derijones]

Is this similar to the Satellite rendering for MR on Maya? From the What's new in Maya 6.5 spiel:

"mental ray for Maya Satellite (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X)

We’ve added support for a new form of network rendering called Satellite. It supplements the mental ray rendering capabilities in Maya with additional rendering power provided by the CPUs of other networked computers. 2 additional CPUs are included with Maya Complete, 8 with Maya Unlimited. This allows you to achieve faster interactive rendering, including IPR, as well as increasing the performance of batch rendering (including command line), and pre-lighting to both textures and vertices."

 

This is aimed at decreasing processing times per image, rather than acting as stand alone licences for a render farm.....I think! I guess that it recognies a maximum of eight CPU's that it can use at a time, rather than using all CPU's on a network with valid licences on. So I suppose as long as you have your render network set up in clusters of eight CPU's attached to a MR machine and can dole out the animation frames from a master, you end up with the same result...instead of one frame per CPU, you have eight CPU's per frame, making each frame process quicker, but less frames concurrently.

I'm now confused!

Cheers

Deri

[mbr]

Could be wrong, but I believe it's only a tad better than what it was. I also believe that it's only good for DR, not for network rendering.

Why they continue to shoot themselves by staying behind the competition in terms of documentation, speed, and licensing is beyond me.

I'd consider giving up Final Render if it was fast enough with good documents, but by the time this is all out there will be new versions of the renderers.

[abicalho]

It is just like Satellites. 1 MAX license can render in up to 8 cpus. It's just like distributed rendering, but it's a separate service.

 

The advantage of owning a MR license is that you can use Network Rendering and have MAX rendering full frames on the slaves, whereas with DBR or Satellites you can only have those extra systems rendering buckets. 1 machine + 3 DBR will be slower than rendering 4 frames on the machines, since DBR has a very intense network traffic.