elemental ray new mental ray blog

[Kzin]

there is a new blog which offers explenation and help for mental ray in general. it will be updated frome time to time with more articles and i think its a really good resource because the people behind it know what they are talking about. ;)

http://elementalray.wordpress.com/

//mod's edit: Linkification service

[ActionArt]

Thanks! That looks very good. Finally, an in depth explanation of unified sampling. Maybe if I read that I can actually get some decent results from it

Thanks for posting!

[ActionArt]

Just reading through this part to start: http://elementalray.wordpress.com/2011/ ... /#comments

"For the layman, unified sampling is a new sampling pattern for mental ray which is much smarter than the older Anti-Aliasing (AA) sampling grid. Unified is smarter because it will only take samples when and where it needs to."

Just curious, has ANYONE found this to actually be true? It doesn't seem to matter how much testing I do the results are always the exact OPPOSITE. Longer renders (sometimes extreme) and worse visual results every time (using all the tips given here).

Is anyone else here getting decent results with unified sampling or is MR just trying to gloss over the worst "feature" ever?

[Kzin]

Just reading through this part to start: http://elementalray.wordpress.com/2011/ ... /#comments

"For the layman, unified sampling is a new sampling pattern for mental ray which is much smarter than the older Anti-Aliasing (AA) sampling grid. Unified is smarter because it will only take samples when and where it needs to."

Just curious, has ANYONE found this to actually be true? It doesn't seem to matter how much testing I do the results are always the exact OPPOSITE. Longer renders (sometimes extreme) and worse visual results every time (using all the tips given here).

Is anyone else here getting decent results with unified sampling or is MR just trying to gloss over the worst "feature" ever?

it is not easy to awnser, because it depends alot on the scene you try to render.
i did alot of tests the last weeks and can say that unified renders faster with better quality.
dof, motion blur and glossis looks far better with faster render times.
and it samples alot better, thats true, better detail catching of glossis for example or smooth raytraced motion blur.

i think the biggest problem is that you have to think different because the sampling of the scene works different then adaptive sampling. my advice is to read all the unified articles, gives you a good overview and starting values.
for example you can use much lower local sampling compared to adaptive. i go with 1 sample for all local samples, glossis, area lights and ao (0.2 of quality for brute force ibl) and let unified do the rest. it works great, because you save alot of time tuning local samples.

in general, the more sampling you have to do for your scene, the more unified shines compared to adaptive.

[ActionArt]

Obviously it's working for some then. I'll work my way through it

Thanks!