To get some interest going for the combo IRay+SI, I figured it might be a good idea to start this thread along with some info on how to get started and a place to collect community test renders&tips.
...so without further ado...
To get started...
- Installl ctrl_ghost_settings from here (IRay is currently unsupported officially, needs this plugin to be activated)
- Get Primitive->Geometry Shader Primitive
- Open its render tree
- Connect a ctrl_ghost_settings node to the Geometry Shader, open properties
- In the "Progessive Rendering" tab, select IRay and set values at bottom to something like 2000/20000/120/0,001.. still figuring out what works best here
- comes free with every Softimage
- pretty fast
- progressive, means you can test really well, seeing result right away
- emissive materials
- IBL for free
- very fast depth of field effects
- bump, displacement
- good integration .. Render Region works
- no hair, subsurface scattering
- only GPU rendering, CPU not utilized (there seems to be a hybrid mode, but have no idea how to activate that)
- limited by GPU RAM. You won't get very far with displacement/large scenes and a 768MB gfx card
- no motion blur, bokeh type dof
- no render tree nodes (mixers,lookup etc.).. Everything needs to be done with textures
- no volumetric rendering
- no instancing (?)
- only mia_material possible as material
- Install something like Real Temp GT to monitor your gfx hw temps. GPU rendering could overheat the card if it isn't properly configured.
- only mia_material works (not even Architectural -- even though they're the same internally)
- For IBL, just setup a Pass environment
- for textures, use a Projection_Lookup node plugged into a mib_texture_lookup node (results in error, which can be ignored)
- for bump maps, use a Projection_Lookup node plugged into a mib_bump_map node (plugged into mia_material's bump port)
- for specular like reflections, use a low refl_gloss value of about 0.2
- for DOF, use physical_lens_dof in pass or camera, bokeh shaders won't work
- Max Timevalue in ctrl_ghost_settings is the maximum render time in seconds. Quality seems to be controlled mostly by this.
Please post all your results here! and let me know if I missed something in this short intro
Here's my first test, emissive textures using mia_material's additional_color slot, render time was 5 minutes on a GTX 460.
- IRayTest1.png (588.31 KiB) Viewed 6353 times
