Messiah Render - speed? complexity?

[Jaspar]

I was wondering the same, and then decided to take the plunge and upgrade to studio.

Only started to play yesterday. Loaded up a UV texture mapped model from lightwave, unfortunately it only imported half of the surface settings. On the plus side, it gave me an excuse to try out building textures in messiah. It seems fairly intuitive, though some of the routes to get some things done do seem a bit convoluted (which seems to ring true with alot of the program). After a while of playing, I had the object set up again and had an opportuntiy to test out the renderer. My initial impressions have been that the renderer is rather slow with both UV textures and procedural shaders. Lightwave rendered the very basic scene with level 9 AA in around 40 secs, messiah rendered three passes (with as good quality AA) in about 2 mins (texture maps, no procedurals). I suppose it might handle larger scenes better, but I have a feeling messiah render's strength lies in it's versatility, features and quality rather than in it's speed. This seems somewhat ironic considering it was first an animation package! That said, I haven't tried the GI yet, it could be good for baking for rendering in Lightwave (when baking's available).

Stability seems fairly good, though there do seem to still be the redraw problems (for me solved by a sweep of the mouse). The interface was also quite slow to switch between menus (compared to lightwave). I found that buttons often didn't work, and drop down menus didn't want to play. These problems varied as to whether I was using the 'newly supported graphics tablets' or an optical mouse, generally persistence paid off. Oh, and I couldn't seem to delete armatures through either the delete button, or the minus key. And if I created keys for all items at once, for some reason, I couldn't delete them all at once. I'd have to individually delete each object's key. I think there were a few other things, but maybe alot of these things are down to being a newbie.

As far as animate is concerned, absolutely brilliant! Has a few oddities, but nothing that interferes to greatly with the shear joy of using it. Well worth the ugrade from 3. To answer your question, I'm a bit stumped about the renderer. It seems full of potential, but is in need of some severe optimizaton, or at the very least more thought put into a propriety network rendering solution to compensate. I'm certainly going to be playing some more, but for now it only seems to have much use as an investment (at these bargain prices).

This is just my opinion, from a few hours of playing. I'd be interested to know if others have found messiah's relative strengths (I've yet to try sub-pixel displacement, or the SSS).

Hope I've been of some help,
and made sense.

[FKMaster]

Loaded up a UV texture mapped model from lightwave, unfortunately it only imported half of the surface settings. try to load a uv textur mapped model from lightwave into maya or 3dmax........

[Jaspar]

why would you want to? :p hehe

[tjnyc]

My judgement is still out, I've been testing some of its feature and here are what I am so far happy with, not with and some things that need further testing.

- Overall Image quality is very nice, seems ideal for film and video work.
- GI is fast and accurate with standard MC solution, it is even faster with GI Noise Reduction, but generally you need to have at least 1 million photons and 1000 GI gather Count with good GI samples, I like using 12 to get rid of almost all the noise. Good for External and Internal shots and good for flicker-free animation. The one negative about GI Noise Reduction that I have is the image looks flat and needs some image processing and color correction.
- I haven't had much success with Photon mapping, and it takes longer than MC. I think I need to do more testing, but so far I am not warm and fuzzy about PM in messiah.
- Caustics DOESN'T work when using Monte Carlo with GI Noise Reduction, but works well enough as is.
- Displacement works and works well, especially for Zbrush guys like myself, but it has problems with large models (above 10K polgons with 4K x 4K disp map) rendering at higher resolutions. I had tried to render at 800x600 at AA 4 with SubD at 4 with the below test scene and messiah crashed 7 out of 10 times I tried on a P4 3GHz HT w/ 2 GB Ram. I might need to do further testing, but so far not looking good. http://www.cgtalk.com/images/icons/icon9.gif

http://www.telescript.com/images/tony/demon2.jpg

- Chikega has done Motion Blur test, so you should check out the thread.
- Chikega has also done SSS test, and they look great.
- Simple shader development via scripting or compiling makes for a robust shading environment for most users.

The renderer shows alot of promise, but for me somethings still feel undone like the displacement and photon mapping, but I like where alot of the things are and I hope we can see some great renderings coming out soon.


Cheers,

[Nonproductive]

Thank you for the replies! I appreciate the honesty and objectiveness.

What I'm reading is basically that it is a capable and versatile render engine - but still needs some spit and polish.

It looks like I may pass on studio for now and upgrade animate to 5. Maybe a future version of Studio will have enough going for it to draw me into a purchase.

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