Maya Renderer

[wedge]

i think the maya renderer is extremely high-quality.... the only shortcomings are it's lack of GI as well as the things you mentioned (speed and post effects). At the same time though, GI is not the most important thing in the world... you can fake things to great effect, and often times using your own lighting rigs can look better than using some GI solution.

[rsalonen]

Yeah, what wgeddes said is pretty much true. GI is not the most important, but if you ever want to get that GI effect you can fake it, might take some longer time to set everything up, since Mayas renderer doesn's assume anything of the user.
A real GI rendering takes LONG time. By faking it you can speed it up allot too! a GI render which would take about 60 minutes can be produced by faking in something like 5-10 minutes (depending on scene)

If you can afford you should get Renderman, now we're talking powerful renderer. It's allot to learn but it's worth it.

I haven't used Mental Ray for maya, but i've heard it's really slow, so go for renderman if you are able to, it's fast, great quality and very effective.

[beaker]

MR is around US$2500 per processor. It goes down as you buy more lics.

[MDuffy]

I haven't done any rendering with Maya yet (we're just using it for rigging and animation), but I've heard that some areas where the Maya Renderer is lacking include motion blurred shadows, and motion blurring (possibly only with shadows?) in reflections. It also may have issues with depth of field stuff.

Again, this is just what I've heard...

Later,
Michael Duffy
mduffy@ionet.net

[beaker]

>>but I've heard that some areas where the Maya Renderer is lacking include motion blurred shadows

You can't motion blur with standard depth map shadows in any 3d app.(except for the new deep shadows that pixar has) You can only motion blur raytraced shadows. This is just how depth map shadows work. It's a limitation everywhere, not just maya.

Maybe they just meant maya's general motion blur, which does suck. It is a huge memory hog, so even when you do get good results you end up breaking the bank in memory.

Your better off rendering your shadows in a separate pass and motion bluring them in post/2d. Motion bluring raytraced shadows is extremly slow, slow, slow.

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