FumeFX plugin for mental Ray

[gman]

Does any one know if the FumeFX plugin for mental works with Softimage mental Ray?
Or a standalone version of Mental Ray?

Thanks

[Mathaeus]

I don't believe it's possible. Probably a lot of calculations belongs to FumeFX itself, not to MR shader.

Also it's hard to find 'on the field' results (means: not done by developers) of such integration. Mental Ray really isn't widely adopted in Max community. And these days, people are reporting issues like broken FG renders of 700k poly scenes, serious bugs with HDR image motion blur (2d, floating point motion blur as a render post effect, Mental Ray's equivalent of 'traditional' one).... maybe because Max finally got a famous BSP2 as default option (even it's still possible to get the old BSP, right in GUI)... After all, 'global illumination' effect can be easily faked by using a bunch of shadow-mapped lights in default scanline renderer, in absolutely predictable and blazing fast way.

For me, MR shader for FumeFX looks more like 'political act'. They did a whole sub-renderer just for Fume, before MR shader.

Long story short, if 'direct' rendering functionality in a Max way is a goal, just a MR shader (or optimization skills ), wouldn't help that much, I'm afraid.

Cheers

[gman]

Thanks Mathaeus,

I was just really hoping for some access to fast volume shaders for softimage.
Thanks for the help.

G

[CiaranM]

AFAIK, they have been developing a library for stand alone rendering of FumeFX data. So, that means you could render in XSI/mentalray/whatever, as long as you have an importer/shader that reads the data.
You'd still have to sim in Max of course.

I think a nice solution would be for rendering of emFluids as volumes...

[Mathaeus]

I was just really hoping for some access to fast volume shaders for softimage.
Thanks for the help.

G

What you can get with Eric Mootz's stuff (emFluid and EmRenderPointCloud), that is it, I would say.

Cheers

[gman]

Thanks I will try the emRPC demo a go , I haven't tried that yet.

Cheers