How long will softimage be Competative...?

[Mathaeus]

I recommended noobs download a 25 year old copy of POV ray and create a photo-real scene by typing into a text file to generate something impressive.... Vray is great but it's not unlike inventions such as autopilot or spellcheck.. It becomes a crutch after a while. You are shielded by the real process of rendering.

Yeah, POV-Ray rules For small story, first time I sow Softimage render, done by individual, it was on one POV-Ray competition, sometime around 1997 I think. Competition was open for everyone including this Softimage thing. While guy talked about some unknown features in image description - exactly unknown for us POV-Ray fanatics, like render passes.. and something else ....
....If I may...... I remember we weren't impressed. Whole thing looked somehow dull for criteria of POV-Ray community. Maybe a sort of Softimage style - but... too much grayish.
Later, when I come on XSI board with XSI Fnd 4, for long time I had a habit to export meshes back to POV-Ray, at least for stills, being totally disappointed with Mental Ray.
Just wanted to show, how visions are different. In other words, I always considered Mental Ray as a piece of inferior and overcomplicated crap, compared to POV-Ray. By the way, even in late 90s, there were scene generators for POV-Ray with 3d GUI, for affordable price or even free. Code-only option was voluntary, reserved only for those who just want this.

[FXDude]

I agree, MR is definately very flexible and 'controlable', perhaps I should have said "not always ideal".

But the only reason why one of these other renders may be a must (for now), would only be because after all this time, through all various attempts, (FG, GI, Irradiance particles, AO Bleeding...)
there has been no easy (if not at-all possible) way to get reasonably usable radiosity in animation, due to almost inevitable artifacts unless you freeze irradiance info, or just too long using brute forcing.

You can quite easily "simulate" the look of radiosity (every aspect except color bleeding)
while rendering very fast compared to the fastest path tracer, enough to make excellent almost PR (almost photoReal) and for that is more than fine, or using FG for traveling in a fixed environment.

But FG, Irradiance particles .. is a no go for anything that moves

Although any of those issues will probably dissapear soon enough, as the last MR sported a nifty new and FAST (promising) GI pathtracer, (finally) despite still being in it's early stages.

which is already usable in v2015... (with diffuse working very well, being the 95% the main thing)
New GI prototype in v2015?
https://www.si-community.com/forum/v ... =10&t=5638

But I wonder if using gpu_gi_plugin.dll of subsequent MR versions would similarly work (?)

[Nox]

Mental ray is faster than vray too, if that matters to anyone. Vray is great for NOOBS who don't really understand ray-tracing, GI and the rendering process. It's one of those apps that you can have zero talent and produce photo-realistic images by just pressing "render"...

You should email these guys:
http://www.blur.com/
http://www.platige.com/en/cinematic/
http://www.unit-image.fr/
and tell them that they are NOOBS who don't really understand ray-tracing, have zero talent and produce photo-realistic images by just pressing "render", so they need to switch to POV-ray which is used by real pros.

[luceric]

Mental ray is every bit as good as vray and is much better than renderman. I don't see why anyone would need anything other than MR... The SDK is part of the power and why it can exceed capabilities of vray and others. Mental ray is faster than vray too, if that matters to anyone. Vray is great for NOOBS who don't really understand ray-tracing, GI and the rendering process. It's one of those apps that you can have zero talent and produce photo-realistic images by just pressing "render"... Which is cool but that doesn't mean it's better than tools like MR that require some skill to maximize/utilize.

I recommended noobs download a 25 year old copy of POV ray and create a photo-real scene by typing into a text file to generate something impressive.... Vray is great but it's not unlike inventions such as autopilot or spellcheck.. It becomes a crutch after a while. You are shielded by the real process of rendering.

"serious work"?? so old ILM films from the 90s are not "serious work"....

Was this post written in 1999 or something? Associating people with Povray to dismiss them? Who talks like this anymore? (Are we gonna talk about "Riven" as an awesome showcase for MR too?) Mental ray better than renderman? VRay a "push button" renderer for newbies vs MR being powerful and requiring "skills" to master? These were all the cries of Softimage|3D fans emotionally defending their investment and believed "elite status" but in reality having never known anything else.

You know ILM and Digital Domain use VRay in film, like, right now, this is not the 1990s. Especially Digital Domain is known to use it on everything. ILM used MR as a ray server for RenderMan because PRMan had no ray tracing ... 10 years ago. Mental ray is totally professional rendering product that gets a lot more work done than people think, going anywhere further than that is dubious.

[nDman]

Put on your mouth guards before fight

[Nox]

Funny thing that not so long time ago Vray was considered as a simple „push button” renderer. Currently this place is occupied by Arnold/Corona/Octane while Vray is „harder to learn renderer that requires a lot of tweaking” and Mental Ray is not considered at all :>

[Maximus]

Yep, all "serious work" is rendered with 3rd party renderers- Arnold, PRman, Vray, 3delight (is it still alive?) and... Mray in the past when it was still strong and 3rd party for most apps.

Mental ray is every bit as good as vray and is much better than renderman. I don't see why anyone would need anything other than MR... The SDK is part of the power and why it can exceed capabilities of vray and others. Mental ray is faster than vray too, if that matters to anyone. Vray is great for NOOBS who don't really understand ray-tracing, GI and the rendering process. It's one of those apps that you can have zero talent and produce photo-realistic images by just pressing "render"... Which is cool but that doesn't mean it's better than tools like MR that require some skill to maximize/utilize.

I recommended noobs download a 25 year old copy of POV ray and create a photo-real scene by typing into a text file to generate something impressive.... Vray is great but it's not unlike inventions such as autopilot or spellcheck.. It becomes a crutch after a while. You are shielded by the real process of rendering.

"serious work"?? so old ILM films from the 90s are not "serious work"....

No offense, but it looks like you are living in the past. Every render engine out there is far superior to Mental Ray. First reason? The implementation. There is no single dcc application where Mental Ray is fully/complete/decently/bug-free Integrated, mostly because they are all Autodesk.

Now lets come to the point where you think that having to code your own shader and write 300 lines of codes to produce the same effect someone else can produce with just ticking one parameter means that MR is better than any other engine. By your same logic we should have sticked to candle flame and not electricity.

Vray is far better written, faster, easy to use (which is a huge improvement for artists), better integrated, has better toolset than mental ray.
Mental Ray sitll doesnt have a decent GI system, i seriously have no idea what you talkin about. If to produce a smooth GI without any artifacts i have to spend 10 days (because otherwise i'm noob in your opinion) while another render engine has a very good GI setup in less than 5 minutes why shouldnt i go for the faster route?

I have no idea about standalone Mental Ray, still browsing their forum looks like there are 3 people using it. I used mental ray for a lot of time, and at the moment is a total piece of crap compared to the competition. Reasons? we all know. Integration, poor documentation, autodesk, few developers, slow to update, counter intuitive, old tech.
Can you produce very good images with it? yes you can
Can you produce very good images in the same amount of time you would do with another engine? Dont think so, unless you are ultra skilled with it, and yet i have my doubts cause you have to confront an ultra skilled in vray and so on.

Oh and lastly, you talk about SDK "The SDK is part of the power and why it can exceed capabilities of vray and others.". Are you aware that other render engines have SDK too?

Bottom line. Why should i spend more time to do something that other tools make me do faster, better?

[markraz]

Mental ray is every bit as good as vray and is much better than renderman. I don't see why anyone would need anything other than MR... The SDK is part of the power and why it can exceed capabilities of vray and others. Mental ray is faster than vray too, if that matters to anyone. Vray is great for NOOBS who don't really understand ray-tracing, GI and the rendering process. It's one of those apps that you can have zero talent and produce photo-realistic images by just pressing "render"... Which is cool but that doesn't mean it's better than tools like MR that require some skill to maximize/utilize.

I recommended noobs download a 25 year old copy of POV ray and create a photo-real scene by typing into a text file to generate something impressive.... Vray is great but it's not unlike inventions such as autopilot or spellcheck.. It becomes a crutch after a while. You are shielded by the real process of rendering.

"serious work"?? so old ILM films from the 90s are not "serious work"....

Was this post written in 1999 or something? Associating people with Povray to dismiss them? Who talks like this anymore? (Are we gonna talk about "Riven" as an awesome showcase for MR too?) Mental ray better than renderman? VRay a "push button" renderer for newbies vs MR being powerful and requiring "skills" to master? These were all the cries of Softimage|3D fans emotionally defending their investment and believed "elite status" but in reality having never known anything else.

You know ILM and Digital Domain use VRay in film, like, right now, this is not the 1990s. Especially Digital Domain is known to use it on everything. ILM used MR as a ray server for RenderMan because PRMan had no ray tracing ... 10 years ago. Mental ray is totally professional rendering product that gets a lot more work done than people think, going anywhere further than that is dubious.

I like all renderers... I just don't think it matters which one you use. Also yes, VRAY is a push button renderer. unlike povray... anyone can make a photo-real image with VRAY. like I stated, try doing the same level of work in POVray that one does in VRAY. It can be done, it is done, but it requires more skill. That's all I'm implying.

I love Vray but I don't need it. I'll use Povray or Vivid or any shareware product... and get the same results. When VRAY came out suddenly everyone could do photo-real but yet a select few were doing it in the 80s with shareware.... It's not a big deal although a distinction had to be made. VRAY can make below average artists appear to be above average.. When PC hardware became fast enough it broke down walls for many. But in reality raytracing and GI/Radiosity for that matter have bee around for decades.

I recall learning about montecarlo algorithms in college in the 80s in a CG class.. .You couldn't utilize them in production on PC hardware at the time, so it wasn't till around 2000 that is started to become usable. Vray was just the first one to implement in such away that anyone could just press "render" and take advantage of such technologies. Now 12 years old kids can download a copy blender and rival professional productions with minimal skill and effort. This is good but let's not get carried away and think just because someone can produce stellar looking CG that they are talented... everything is given to us now. It's all push button essentially.

[Bullit]

Mentalray was the single biggest disappointment when i came to Softimage.

To make an image comparable to Vray or Finalrender we needed hack shaders from CTRL guys.
Yeah like luceric says with "push button" opinion seems we returned to 10 years ago.

I don't even want the guess what will be the blame tag level to something like Redshift.

[markraz]

Yep, all "serious work" is rendered with 3rd party renderers- Arnold, PRman, Vray, 3delight (is it still alive?) and... Mray in the past when it was still strong and 3rd party for most apps.

Mental ray is every bit as good as vray and is much better than renderman. I don't see why anyone would need anything other than MR... The SDK is part of the power and why it can exceed capabilities of vray and others. Mental ray is faster than vray too, if that matters to anyone. Vray is great for NOOBS who don't really understand ray-tracing, GI and the rendering process. It's one of those apps that you can have zero talent and produce photo-realistic images by just pressing "render"... Which is cool but that doesn't mean it's better than tools like MR that require some skill to maximize/utilize.

I recommended noobs download a 25 year old copy of POV ray and create a photo-real scene by typing into a text file to generate something impressive.... Vray is great but it's not unlike inventions such as autopilot or spellcheck.. It becomes a crutch after a while. You are shielded by the real process of rendering.

"serious work"?? so old ILM films from the 90s are not "serious work"....

No offense, but it looks like you are living in the past. Every render engine out there is far superior to Mental Ray. First reason? The implementation. There is no single dcc application where Mental Ray is fully/complete/decently/bug-free Integrated, mostly because they are all Autodesk.

Now lets come to the point where you think that having to code your own shader and write 300 lines of codes to produce the same effect someone else can produce with just ticking one parameter means that MR is better than any other engine. By your same logic we should have sticked to candle flame and not electricity.

Vray is far better written, faster, easy to use (which is a huge improvement for artists), better integrated, has better toolset than mental ray.
Mental Ray sitll doesnt have a decent GI system, i seriously have no idea what you talkin about. If to produce a smooth GI without any artifacts i have to spend 10 days (because otherwise i'm noob in your opinion) while another render engine has a very good GI setup in less than 5 minutes why shouldnt i go for the faster route?

I have no idea about standalone Mental Ray, still browsing their forum looks like there are 3 people using it. I used mental ray for a lot of time, and at the moment is a total piece of crap compared to the competition. Reasons? we all know. Integration, poor documentation, autodesk, few developers, slow to update, counter intuitive, old tech.
Can you produce very good images with it? yes you can
Can you produce very good images in the same amount of time you would do with another engine? Dont think so, unless you are ultra skilled with it, and yet i have my doubts cause you have to confront an ultra skilled in vray and so on.

Oh and lastly, you talk about SDK "The SDK is part of the power and why it can exceed capabilities of vray and others.". Are you aware that other render engines have SDK too?

Bottom line. Why should i spend more time to do something that other tools make me do faster, better?

Sure vray is better out of the box but MR should not stop anyone from producing great results. XSI has been MR since day one. What were you guys using back in 2000? Sumatra/XSI 1.0?? I don't recall vray for XSI until mid to late 2000s. I only use vray within max. I never even needed it in XSI. I think MR is fine.

living in the past?? Ironically anyone on an XSI web page is living in the past. The product is dead.

[Daniel Brassard]

Because Softimage is EOL does not make it dead, especially if the alternative is not where Softimage is in term of functionality! It's more like a forced retirement.

Ironically, working in Max or Maya is working in the past ... Sooner or later, they will also be retired.

The big question is "Are the days of the all-in-one 3D DCC apps coming to an end?"

[Bullit]

I used Vray in Max in 2003 and before that Finalrender. There was no comparison to Mentalray at time even if you spent 50 hours to 1.

I came to Softimage in 2004.

[Daniel Brassard]

POVRay, what a blast from the past, they are now at version 3.7 rc6 since nov 2013.

How far they have come since its early days of CompuServe...

[Mathaeus]

so they need to switch to POV-ray which is used by real pros.

Well just for sake of "historical truth" and small ball of vampires, too . I think 99 percent of POV-Ray work is non commercial. "Coding" refers to scene description language, not writing the shaders or tweaking render settings. Basic work isn't anything more complex than plain HTML. So, IF someone wants to code, this is how to organize objects in scene, some loop here and there for placing the duplicates, so on. Renderer itself is pretty straightforward ray tracer. Few types of lights , highlights, diffuse color, ray traced reflection, slow but predictable radiosity, that's it. Comes with radiosity presets, I think five levels of speed - quality. Smartest way perhaps was to put some lights, enable radosity level four or five, wait some days or weeks.

Today is unusable, it never ever jumped to multi - threading. If I'm correct, latest version (around 14 years old, not 25 ) tries to utilize many cores by "symmetric multi processing", which is just not "it".

In best times, it was very popular, it's first renderer used out of planet Earth on International Space Station. One of early developers, today is CEO of Solid Angle.

[markraz]

my original reference to "povray" was more or less sarcasm.. I was joking. However my point was comparatively to vray , POVray required some thought and skill to utilize. Early povray you had to type in everything into a text file. The CSG was all done through scripting. It's not like today where the developers hand you everything on a silver platter. VRAY as great as it is, is essentially a one button renderer. It's not something you need to have an in depth knowledge of CG or any real artistic ability to utilize. That's cool though.

I wonder what NVidia has planned for MR?? Iray seem like the way to go in Max these days at least with still shots

[Bullit]

That doesn't make sense. Then your could argue you only know if you build a new render engine everytime you need an image.

Even more bizarre is your consideration about artistic ability, is it defined because you needed at least 7 lights(3 point+4 for each wall) to iluminate an interior scene in the past? In what way that is more artistic than with 3? Why not 10, 20 then , are more artistic if we paint each pixel?

In real life you need 2 or 3 IES equivalent ones? well vray is certainly much nearer that.