Mental ray 3.9 features list

[Maximus]

What's new in Version 3.9

Here is a summary of some of the new features and feature improvements in version 3.9 of mental ray. Please refer to the release notes for more details and for other changes which are not mentioned here.

Unified Sampling

Introduce a new sampling mechanism that unifies the different sampling controls of the ray tracing, rasterizer, and progressive rendering engines. It offers direct control of sampling quality coupled with perceptual adaptivity to detail in the image. It is disabled by default, and gets enabled and controlled with string options. The existing sampling controls are kept for backwards compatibility and work as in previous versions of mental ray when the feature is not turned on.

Motion Blur

The ray tracing acceleration algorithm BSP2 in mental ray has been revised and dramatically improved both in terms of memory usage and speed when rendering scenes with motion blur. Especially, scenes with lots of instanced geometry render ray tracing motion blur using just a small fraction of the memory compared to previous versions. In many cases with extreme instance motion this new approach is able to outperform the rasterizer.

In addition, the quality of motion blur has been enhanced by shading with time-accurate normals and shadow tolerances. This may lead to visible differences in the rendered images caused by, now exactly computed, light reflections on animated objects, or similar. The effect of this improvement becomes most obvious in rotating objects.

Hair Rendering

Hair rendering, especially with ray tracing, is noticeably accelerated and memory consumption is reduced. The rarely used per-vertex normal feature is deprecated to improve performance. A new option allows to control if hair caps should be created for ray tracing.

Stereoscopic Rendering

The most common stereo mode offaxis support a parallax option for convenient control of the zero parallax plane distance. Additional configuration registry variables allow to customize the file names of the stereo images.

iray 1.2

The updated version 1.2 of the iray rendering engine is built into mental ray. It provides numerous improvements in performance and quality, as well as added support for existing common shaders. ling support for new CUDA architecture Fermi

MetaSL 1.2

The updated version of MetaSL 1.2 is supported by mental ray, providing new features like material definitions and techniques. The LLVM back-end performance has been improved noticeably.

Native Particle Rendering

mental ray can now render particles. Currently, particles with certain pre-defined shapes are supported that are stored in native 3d Map files. With the help of shaders external point cloud and particle formats can be used with mental ray.

Unified Caching

The finalgather map has been switched to utilize the 3d Map primitive and file format for internal caching and disk storage. This offers benefits like better handling of large maps, and publication and exchange of finalgather map data for display and use with other software.

New Utilities

New helpful tools are delivered with mental ray. The imf_comp utility is a small and simple compositing tool that allows to combine images rendered with mental ray easily. The dsm_copy utility can be used to convert detail shadow map files generated with mental ray to regular image files for display and investigation.

New Shader Package

A new shader package userdata is now part of mental ray. It supports special workflows with large scene, where dynamic attributes attached to scene elements can indirectly drive parameters of the assigned shader(s).

Scene Description Language

The following changes were made in the .mi scene description syntax:

The unified sampling mode can be controlled with new string options:
"unified sampling" on|off
"samples min" float
"samples max" float
"samples quality" color
"samples error cutoff" color
Note, that min/max samples specifies the actual number of samples to take, not a sample level or exponent as in traditional sampling. Otherwise, these parameters have similar meaning of determining the lower and upper limits of overall samples. Adaptive sampling and oversampling rate is controlled with the quality and error parameters. A higher quality value will lead to better quality. The "soft" valid range for the quality color components is [0,1], however, larger values are accepted. The default value is 0.5. The error cutoff defines a threshold where further improvements are considered negligible. The default value is zero (black). Setting it to higher values will lead to less samples taken in dark areas of the image.
The hair endings may be flat or rounded caps. A global option allows to control the creation of caps for all hair objects in a scene in case of ray tracing.
"hair caps" on|off
Shader Writing and Integration

New query modes have been introduced to return per-vertex data of geometric primitives for triangles and hair.
miQ_HAIR_NUM_TEXTURES
miQ_HAIR_NUM_USERS
miQ_HAIR_USERS
miQ_PRI_NUM_VERTICES
miQ_PRI_VERTICES_POINTS
miQ_PRI_VERTICES_NORMALS
miQ_PRI_VERTICES_MOTION
miQ_PRI_VERTICES_TEX
miQ_PRI_VERTICES_USER
miQ_PRI_VERTICES_BUMPS_U
miQ_PRI_VERTICES_BUMPS_V
miQ_PRI_VERTICES_DERIVS_U
miQ_PRI_VERTICES_DERIVS_V
miQ_PRI_VERTICES_DERIVS_UU
miQ_PRI_VERTICES_DERIVS_VV
miQ_PRI_VERTICES_DERIVS_UV
miQ_PRI_VERTICES_DERIVS_VU
miQ_PRI_VERTICES_DERIVS_UV
They offer more reliable ways to retrieve such data in shaders, in comparison to the deprecated function mi_tri_vectors. At the same time, queries of hair per-vertex user data are now supported. See mi_query for more details.



http://docs.autodesk.com/MENTALRAY/2012 ... .9%20Help/

[ActionArt]

Thanks for the list! I was curious about this. Looks quite interesting. Seems as though they've addressed some long time concerns like motion blur but time will tell.

Now if we could just get that Iray hooked up in SI...

[Mathaeus]

Don't want to be negative, but... it's "In many cases with extreme instance motion this new approach is able to outperform the rasterizer" - I'd believe most of people already learnt to use some post-process motion blur, rasterizer for 3d motion blur if it's necessary.. a bit too much conditions here, also comparisons with 'self'.

As far as I can recall, they never-ever published the exact list of bug-fixes (for example, Vray always had a *very* precise list). It seems that in their lingo, 'great improvement' is a word for bug-fix.

Nothing about software radiosity, btw. It seems this is completely left to IRay.

Anyway, it's nice that Maximus already posted his 'annual plan' for all these long, complaining posts... Sorry I can't resist...

[Maximus]

@Mathaeus: ahah yeah you're right
Well as fanboy i can seem, i really like MR, what i would love to see is just more implementation, i've tried many times to test other engine but always came back to MR thats why i complain:p
We'll see, anyway the status of MR inside soft is not bad at all, i just would like to have more (like everything), also i strongly respect what AD guys are doing with Soft, so i apologize if sometimes i look like a psycho when it comes to MR

hmm well there is the detailed bug fix list but i forgot to post

here it is:

http://docs.autodesk.com/MENTALRAY/2012 ... notes.html

[Mathaeus]

hmm well there is the detailed bug fix list but i forgot to post

here it is:
http://docs.autodesk.com/MENTALRAY/2012 ... notes.html

then, I'll stay corrected - well a long time ago I've used it, seriously.

cheers

[ActionArt]

From that list it appears this version has focused very heavily on bug fixes and some help for motion blur which should be quite helpful for most users (if those bugs are actually fixed). That is one massive list of bug fixes, I didn't know there were that many! Nice to see them concentrating on a more solid product.

I recently ran into a bad memory leak with instanced objects in a simulation and it seems this may have been fixed in 3.9.

Overall, I think it may be a good release.

[SreckoM]

Exactly why I do not like 'MR and other apps' integration model.
Until you get hand on version that has all bug fixes and new features implemented, you need to wait for almost one year (for new features implementation even more).

Looking how competition do their job, this really sucks.

Anyway, nice work on fixing bugs.

[luceric]

Softimage, Maya and Max 2012 have 3.9.1.37 and therefore all the bug fixes included in that list and the new shader APIs and internal enhancements listed in the first post

[McNistor]

Softimage, Maya and Max 2012 have 3.9.1.37 and therefore all the bug fixes included in that list and the new shader APIs and internal enhancements listed in the first post

realy? nice!
first time in history when SI has the same (newest) version as max and/or maya, i believe.

[luceric]

No, Softimage 2011 was the first time that all three applications had the same mental ray version.

[McNistor]

As far as I know XSI didn't have all mray features revealed to user (as max did) so I could say only with the name was on par with its sister.
Hm, now that you've told me that, I believe 2012 won't be any different.

[Maximus]

core and dll version is the same for everyone, what is "Customized" by AD is what features (meaning new features, not core stuff) will get exposed.

Example: bug fixes and performance improve are core features and every 3d package will get that because they are part of the MR core dll
iRay is a feature and its up to AD to decide if implement, when, where and how.

Since 2011 all 3 max maya xsi had the same MR core version, but different features exposed.

[McNistor]

Hey Maximus, I don't know if you intended this but you're supporting my point with what you just said.
Thanks anyway

[luceric]

which is what I wrote

Softimage, Maya and Max 2012 have 3.9.1.37 and therefore all the bug fixes included in that list and the new shader APIs and internal enhancements listed in the first post

we include all the bug fixes

[Nizar]

No, Softimage 2011 was the first time that all three applications had the same mental ray version.

Example: bug fixes and performance improve are core features and every 3d package will get that because they are part of the MR core dll
iRay is a feature and its up to AD to decide if implement, when, where and how.

I'm a bit confused... between the three software, are feature now the some? In 2011 release SI have not the some 3dsm feature

[Hirazi Blue]

All three software packages use the same version of Mental Ray, but not all of them implement all the new features. So the basics (and the bug-fixes) are the same for all three software packages, while some of the features (for example "iray") are only implemented in one package (in this case: 3ds Max) and not in the others.
;)