It's something I've been wondering about for a long time. I get them easy in modo and I see VRay users get them on similar types of render I've been doing a lot as well - I can only seem to get the effect by really aiming for it in mental ray using final gather.



Amen to that - I prefer the same approach most of the times.

---


Been rendering some animations - nothing fancy at all. Just barely getting into things.

Mental ray, Dragon


VRay, Dragon


Nothing much going on in the dragon scene - not really a good flicker test scene/setup.


Mental ray, Room


VRay, Room


Severe flicker in the VRay version - must dig into what the different parameters do and which ones are the vital ones.

Render times are pointless for now. I'll improve the room scene and see what I can come up with.

Ps. Lighting in the room scene is a giant plane (geometry) placed just behind the camera @ the size of the wall as well. Screw realism

EDITED my last post with Arnold and Ground Truth comparisons. In case you guys want to take a look, go back to page 5

Users of Arnold should be banned Great renders though. Love the shadows.

I had a look at some SSS shading (something I've amazingly enough never really used) prior to the room scene.

Prepped the mental ray version first. Settled for this look:


Then tried to get something similar - landed with this after loads of struggle:


The mr SSS shader seemed overwhelming (more stuff to adjust) but I was able to get something after just few minutes. The VRay SS however - far less parameters yet no idea whats going on because I feel like I'm walking on fragile ice as if whatever tweak I do, is on the verge to break. For instance, I used a stretched ball (scaling was frozen afterwards) while I was prepping the shader, to gain a bit speed with preview renders. Looked perfectly fine with smooth shading and all.Tthen I render this and I'm getting hard lines. Barely any SSS effect.. just looks wrong and so flat.


I'm currently doing some brute force renders of the room.

mental ray (number off samples could have been higher - but it's just for reference)


and VRay with brute force as prim and light cache with 2500 subdivs as secondary.


I haven't bothered matching the look at all yet. Was in a hurry when I worked on the scene

Very hard occlusion going on as if I have a classic lightsource in there. I don't have any.

Settings (Light Cache)
Passes: 8
Subdivs: 2500
Sample size: 1 (too high I suppose?)
Scale: World

Rest are default I think.

Suggestions?

AFAIK, VRay SSS2 is closer to good old ray-trace subsurface shaders for MR, like Daniel Rind's Diffusion - of course with a few modern knobs more. That is, much more realistic than 'z buffer' mi_fast_sss stuff. You should be able to get believable long-range scattering too, with VRay SSS2 (cheese, deep blue ice, so on), not only skin. However, these shaders are very sensitive to distance in world units - maybe the shader scales itself together with object's scale.... If you can, don't hesitate to multiply the output, let's say by 2, 3... just to see what happens (color_math_basic node or something).

in the Vray material.why the use interpolation setting is grayed out.

Hi!
Does anyone know if the procedural/fractal shaders are implemented ?
Can't find them...

thnx!
Rui

"We expect VRay | Softimage to be available for purchase around Feb 10 or
so (slight variations are possible, we have a large reseller network).
Of course, we will still take beta input and try to fix any serious
issues - our cutoff date is February 5th."

So, stay tuned for Feb 10.

Time to grease my skates, as temperatures in hell are about to drop sharply...

Seriously, though, interesting news...