Cartoon short rendering advice needed

[Invader_Zim]

This article should help with the decisions Choosing a renderer. (http://www.zaon.com/company/articles/3d_rendering.php)
Mental Ray can be faster than Maya software in some cases. That link you posted has very simple textures and should be pretty easy to set up in either MR or Maya. I dont have any experience with baking out things. From my experience and the articles I've read Final Gather isn't pracitcal for any kind of short film work it just takes to long to render in Mental Ray. Using Maya Software will be easier to texture, easier to set up and light but you might be plauged by aliasing issues and jittering pixels.

And what the terms mean is basically: Global Illumination- Your lights in the scene shoot out Photons which bounce around the scene causing the color from objects closest to each other to blead onto each other. This give the scenes the soft look like your looking for.
Final Gather- Every object in the scene shoots out it's own photons. So you could theoretically light a scene using objects. This is also where HDRI comes into play where you light the scene using a photo instead of lighting.

Since you arn't starting the project right away A plug in of Renderman for Maya is coming out next month. You might consider investing some time into exploring that. Renderman has a lot more documentation than Mental Ray.

Some of the better ways to speed up mental ray are avoid Displacement maps. Even with MRs microploygon calculation they take some time. Limit your lights, look into using Normal maps. Learn how to adjust your render globals. The BSP (in memory Performance) can really speed things up.

[Nicool]

You could also search for the tutorials explaining how to use PaintFX to get a nice painted style render. KeithLango (add a .com to reach him) used it for his short film "the secret joys of miopa"

[Invader_Zim]

I would love to hear I'm wrong, but paintFX doesn't render in mental Ray and since it renders post it could mean a bit of a compositing nightmare.

[CoolDuck]

Thx for the useful explanation of MR etc... I'm going to look more into global illumination and the render globals. I haven't really used GI before, only FG.
I think many will be happy with the release of Renderman for maya.

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