Bellsey wrote: ↑22 Nov 2017, 15:00
Also, as a side note remember how painful it was to really render anything from ICE?
My impression was more around 'limited by MR capabilities', somehow typical "can display in viewport, can not render'' for SI. For exact example, ICE was able to do a way more complex hair-strands structures than Shave in XSI, especially variations in hair density, but MR rasterizer as best MR option for such task in these times, took ages to render, whatever option I've tried. And that was only a start of problems, in XSI 2010 it was nasty bug with rasterizer and ICE strands. In short, support for ICE strands in 3delight, 2010, was a savior of my strand works, otherwise I think I'll stop completely with XSI anything, around 2009 - 2010. 3delight was present as XSI plugin since XSI6, however they added support for ICE strands later, in early 2010.
As true REYES renderer, it was around 5 -10 times stronger than MR, while yeah, it delivered own set of problems. Anyway, I think ICE FX part, clearly showed how weak is one-renderer-for-all *concept*, at least in these times. I naively believed in idea, strongly supported by MR TDs on SI forums, that we do not need REYES renderer in SI because we already have MR rasterizer, which was true in some parts, as long as mentioned 5-10 times weaker and slower was OK....
Later, since around 2011, Arnold and other path tracers with usable support for MIS (multiple importance sampling), like Blender Cycles or Houdini Mantra, finally introduced the unified user experience for hair and hard surface rendering, for price of rendering time, but, *unified*. I'd say, around 2011 MR was completely out of ''circle of leaders''.
Before let's say 2011 it was ''just'' an unrealistic, over optimistic idea of having one renderer for all. MR always been a great Jack of all trades, master of none. For another example, around XSI 6 I knew I had to leave some particle sprite rendering gigs to Mayans, because they were able to deliver probably 20X times faster, using Maya Hardware renderer. Maxers already had V-Ray for interiors, while for simple characters good old Max Scanline or Maya SW were able to offer a way faster rendering, OK minus few rendering features, but completely unrecognizable for buyers in these times.
I do not blame developers for anything, I'd believe they did best possible. However, in 2017, if some user still defends idea of using only MR and nothing else, for everything, now that's more a subject for kind of re-socialization program, IMO.