Some HQVP tests i was doing, capture coming soon



Capture

nice,
have you tested importons and fg together? should be faster then fg alone, could reduce the rendertime a bit more.

I haven't tried that yet. I'm not too familiar with the settings or even what it's supposed to accomplish so it might take a while to get good results.

Siddharth - that's a pretty fine looking HQV preview.

Well, I tried it with the default settings and it took 10 times longer to do the importon pass than to render the entire image before, and then the render took 3 times longer.

Obviously, there's a lot I don't know about importons and how to use them but doesn't look to promising. MR is not known for it's intelligent default settings and this is no exception.

Documentation on it is light to say the least. Basically, how to turn it on, that's it. It seems like their tech writer has quit altogether or something. I'll have to find more on it somewhere else. I guess the days of getting real manuals with your software are gone gone gone.

Just had a basic play with the crowd scenes, had 20,000 in a stadium crowd and rendering in the viewport at around 6Gb memory usage, and the viewport was still very responsive. Impressed with that side of it definitely. Would be nice if there was an easy way to drive the colour of the mesh using the crowd particle color attribute.

HQV will take some getting used to but seeing procedurals in the bump mixed is nice - not as fast as I would like, but useful none the less.

Mental ray 3.10 update broke hair shading with detail shadow maps for me

Some tests... Bottom left image is the settings I usually use.

Mental Ray 3.10 (right column) removes most hair detail (see top of head). Even when using black shadows (top right image).



Probably it's the transparency cut off at depth 250 they introduced with version 3.10

___
edit.. another test

both 3.10, using shadowmaps should result in the same render output than using detail shadowmaps with black shadows..

Are your color management / pass gamma correction settings the same? Just checking because I already made that mistake and was frustrated for a bit.

Yes, they're the same, tried a lot of things but found no way to get the details back. I'll probably drop a post at the mental ray forum. Shadowmap and detail shadowmaps shouldn't produce that different results without using transparent shadows.

As a hobbyist, is MR attractive because of the level of integration into SI, versus other render engine alternatives?

You know, shader support, pass support, the whole render pipeline support that MR has, that other render engines may not.

Just personal preference I suppose and it has a lot to do with what you want to accomplish. I've tried several other alternatives and it looks great at first but I always run into a wall somewhere unexpected that destroys the experience. I would recommend trying others like 3Delight just to see how they work for you. It's not hard to try it.

Like it or hate it, MR can do just about anything and although people say it's slow in comparison to others, my experience is the opposite. For what I try to do day to day it's faster than anything else I can get and has unmatched flexibility.

You just need to spend a bit of time really getting to understand it, and it should be fine.

I'm really liking this version so far but just started testing.

I highly recommend this book to get started. It's great reading for anyone rendering, not just MR: http://www.amazon.ca/mental-ray-Maya-3ds-Max/dp/0470008547/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1334337973&sr=8-10

Only a few settings have really changed since this was written so it still applies.