3rd party renderers for Softimage?

[Tak Tak]

Is Mental Ray not enough?

[dmonk]

Do not sleep on metal ray. :wise:

[yog]

Maxwell will support XSI soon. It supports it now if you use Matadorlight (3rd party plug-in) to create and transfer a MXS file into Maxwell.

Chaos Group say that the stand alone version of Vray will support XSI when it is released (no idea when tho). Displacement in Vray is exceptional.

[Tak Tak]

finalRender is coming 2006... maybe...
http://www.cebas.com/products/feature.php?UD=10-7888-35-788&PID=52&FID=467

[toluabisola]

Thanks for all the replies!!

Tak Tak: Mental Ray is a great renderer, but it doesn't quite cut the mustartd for me when it comes to rendering displacements. If you look at the displacement output of renderers such as V-Ray or Turtle they are (in my opinion) more impressive than Mental Ray, by more impressive, i mean more of your ZBrush detail is picked up and I know its more hassle to get half decent results than the other packages mentioned.

Even though I am more of a Lightwave user, I do love the power of XSI. It would just be nice to see the package with more variety in the choice of Renderer (V-Ray would be nice)

[tsupka]

mentalray isn't a "push-one-button" type rendering
but it can render perfect displacement or whatever if you learn it ))

[leigh]

What's wrong with Mental Ray? :shrug:

[ThirdEye]

What's wrong with Mental Ray? :shrug:

While i'm not a Mental Ray expert at all i have to say i found its displacement quite tricky and its Final Gather a bit poor when compared to finalRender's or Vray's. Also MAYBE building up a Vray renderfarm would cost less than a Mental Ray one.

[wurp]

I agree with you, while I found that displacements can render really quickly with the right settings etc, FG is just pure crap to me, blotchy, slow and its hard to get nice detailed shadows with it. I hope to try the mr 3.4 soon which would solve some of this. I would not want to replace mr with for example vray, not for now anyway, id rather see that they improve all areas of mr to match with some other renderers, using different renderers would just be a mess imo, unless its 100% integreated, which I doubt it would be...




While i'm not a Mental Ray expert at all i have to say i found its displacement quite tricky and its Final Gather a bit poor when compared to finalRender's or Vray's. Also MAYBE building up a Vray renderfarm would cost less than a Mental Ray one.

[T4D]

What's wrong with Mental Ray? :shrug:

i got to agree with Leigh I started in LW and XSI is a huge leap forward
BUT with that large leap forward there's also a Huge learning curve
Many many XSI users and studios uses MR for displacement so it does work for them.

I have only done basic test in Zbrush to Lw and XSI and my pic's so far have XSI Way ahead And I've only followed the basic tutorials and havn't got any errors in the way MR renders ? could it be it's not MR, but you don't know how to fully uses it yet ?

I know watching the videos ( the fact most of the videos cover MR only )
gives you the idea that MR is a huge complex area of the package may spending more time on learning the ins and out of MR it may give you what you want
:beer:

[yog]

i got to agree with Leigh I started in LW and XSI is a huge leap forward
BUT with that large leap forward there's also a Huge learning curve
Many many XSI users and studios uses MR for displacement so it does work for them.I would feel exactly the same way if I had come direct from LW, because IMHO MR is much better than LW's native renderer in just about all aspects. But for certain tasks and styles there are better alternatives.

I also use Vray with MAX for architectural work, and TBH the GI speed and cleaness is staggering. Also the soft reflections and displacement in Vray are probably the best around (barring the possibility of PRman). In fact the quality and speed of soft reflections in Vray has allowed for replacing the specular shading fake with more realistic reflection speculars in a lot of cases.

Also I wonder how much of the success of Mental Ray in XSI has to do with it's implementation and it's Render Tree connection. Being a MAx user as well, I have tried MR for MAX, and TBH I don't really get on with it, possibly partly due to the fact that it is tied to MAX's standard Material Editor, which I'm certainly not a big fan of.

[T4D]

Can you post some pic's of this Better displacement or Bad displacement
I'm no render guru at all, that why I ask,

What does Good vs bad displacement look like ??

I've used Lw for years, But have learnt an insane amount about how 3D renders work by watching the XSI videos and playing with mentalray there great Videos, But it all still melts my brain trying to understand it all, so still lost when it come to this complex stuff.:eek:

MR Vs LW you can see the missing subpixel displacement LW doesn't have with a simple test, you just don;t get the detail out of a LW render UNLESS you bring the Sub-D level up a insane amount. which in turn Blows render times out the window. but gives the 16 bit displacement map room to show it's detail.

but the same model, same displacement map I don't understand how it could go bad

But i was thinking a UV displacement maps from Zbrush would be like a UV color map from Photoshop

if you load a UV Colour map on a model in Lw or in XSi or Maya etc
it will look basicly the same Except for some colour, light etc issues
the texture will be in the same place.

with this ( simple ) logic in mind, wouldn't a displacement maps ( that's setup correctly ) give any 3D renders the same height information/displacement info ?

Ok this may sound silly to the render guru's out there
I'm Interested in learning something So please I'll be happy to get more info on this :thumbsup:

[yog]

Can you post some pic's of this Better displacement or Bad displacement
I'm no render guru at all, that why I ask, ......

with this ( simple ) logic in mind, wouldn't a displacement maps ( that's setup correctly ) give any 3D renders the same height information/displacement info ?
Maybe not better in quality, but IMHO much better in speed.
It's not unusual for Vray users to use displacement for everything from carpet pile to long grass.

The rough Vray example I have cobbled up is just a single quad poly with a basic B/W noise map applied to it for displacement.
http://www.meshmonkey.eclipse.co.uk/cgtalk/grass_Test.jpg

Now you could do this in MR, but I'm reasonably certain it would take considerable longer to render than the 5 minitues my P4, 1.5Mhz comp using Vray did ;)

[Studev]

I just feel every software have their own frustation. And i just want to say, not even any single software which really satisfy me fully. Not even one. So no point of talking which is better. It all depends on your work scope.

I personally consider Vray as my most favorites renderer, but i don't like 3DsMax, because i'm so used to XSI, and i like it especially the work flow and the look of the interface. But for now, i still left in frustation waiting for a more user friendly renderer. And yes, i prefer that rather than i have to play around with the scripting, understanding this and that, the work around bla...bla...blaa....sorry i have no time for that. Sometimes, it's just too overwhelming. You quickly become a really technical person and at the same time, you're slowly left behind in artistic sense. I want to concentrate more on that rather than technical. I really really don't like it. I'm buying a cake, you can't told me to add the cream later by myself. I want solution.

This is my feeling towards applications nowadays. Somehow I feel better with pencil.

Regards

[Eraq]

I think MentalRay is a supercool render though its much more complex to set up.
Im much much more interrested in a connection to RenderMan for XSI than the other "push-buttom"-renderes ( no offends )

Erik

[Studev]

If you're talking about "connection" between this and that. That's already hints a push button renderer. No offends too, just think about it carefully. Eg. Renderman Artist Tools for Maya.

To access to advance stuff, you need to know in and out about the software and that's really technical. Renderman ? You better know scripting before hand, no such things as connection or bridge whatever anymore.

My 2 cents

[NRat]

MR is really great render and it is much more powerful than vray and other "plugins". It has wide range of tools, especially in xsi.
But Vray is much faster with Global Illumination now no matter how hard you setup MR. FG in MR is very slow now - cant wait to try MR 3.4 in xsi...

[wurp]

I agree here, Im sick of hearing "its fast if you know how to tweak it" well its not, its faster, but not fast. From what I've heard about mr 3.4 its supposed to reduce blotches a lot, so you only need half the amount of samples to get the same result, also its said to calculate the samples faster. I saw some nice renders with FG in some thread in the maya forum, the guy had one of those typical "vray scenes" with qute simple geometry in an outdoor scene, it looks really good and rendertimes were still quite low, around 40 mins from what I can remember and this was rendered in mr 3.4.

MR is really great render and it is much more powerful than vray and other "plugins". It has wide range of tools, especially in xsi.
But Vray is much faster with Global Illumination now no matter how hard you setup MR. FG in MR is very slow now - cant wait to try MR 3.4 in xsi...

[Studev]

Whatever it is, I will have a problems if every frames took 40 min to render. What about if i have a 7 sec shot to render ? And not to mention, flickering result ? Great if MR 3.4 reduces this a lot. This is the thing about FG that it needs to re-calculate everytimes something move. Baking FG into rendermaps is the things that i half way go through without any luck yet.

While in other renderer like Vray, first frame may took couple of hours to render. But the rest of the frames is just in a minute. Speed does matter in production.

So I don't know if MR keep sticks with FG is good. It doesn't look like it. I just have a feeling somehow it will be still the same. So i don't bother to wait for mr 3.4

[Splin]

Before i start i would just like to say i have researched my queery but came up with minimal/ in-conclusive info. But if this is common knowledge.....my apologies in advance

Are there any other 3rd party renderers for softimage? particularly one that is good with displacement maps created in ZBrush.

Just saw the latest update of Turtle but got pissed when i found out its only available for Maya.

I would reccomend you the XSI Production series DVD about rendering. Displacement map tuning is very well covered there and will help you a lot I guess. Basically it will give you right direction how this workflow is set up and functions...

About the Vray vs MR, I still cant understand how discussion landed there. In my opinion comparements are pretty pointless and wont help you once end of the day arrives. Both these products have their market segment and users are happy on both sides. Use whatever gets the job done ;)

[toluabisola]

Thank You Splin :thumbsup:

[Splin]

Thank You Splin :thumbsup:

If you are particulary interested about zBrush & XSI then another good thing to check out would be the "Practical guide to zBrush". Or something like this, cannot remember exact name. Some time ago it was distributed freely in net to help out the community. Maybe you can still find it. Basically it had workflow examples with different applications. How one goes applying zBrush displacement maps in various 3d packages.
Good luck!

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