matalray for maya in production

[DesignDawg]

Actually, in my experience, if you're just raytracing a scene, i.e. not using any features Maya's renderer doesn't support, Mental Ray is much faster. --Much faster, and a little higher quality. However, when you start using it for HDRI, final gathering, GI, etc.... then you start getting into some major render times.
I have not used it on a "production", perse, but I have used it quite a bit for R&D, and I think it's a great rendering tool, absolutely necessary for some effects, but, at the same time, in its current version, not quite ready for primetime (at least in the fast-turn-around world that is commercial production.)

Ricky

[alexx]

i am mostly going conform with designdawg.
only one thing i noticed since a very long time ago (older softimage versions):
if you have REALLY a lot of objects in your scene (i am not talking about faces.. i really mean objects) - something around 50.000 +, mental ray gets extremely slow compared to mayas renderer.

in general i had the experience, that mayas renderer is really nice in handling very large scenes..
but ok..
that is really not often that this happens and if so, you can still break up the rendering and comp it later :)

cheers

alexx

[meshman]

Ok I see, Wonder how many render nodes is required to get som serious result in a real production pipeline?

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.