Alternative maya renderers?

[daniel77]

Turtle is the way to go if you want a simple but powerful setup. Its a bit limited today but release 2 will be anonsed at Sigraph

[Droolz]

Thanks a lot, I'll have a look. I've also been looking at the ART render card, the output looks great. Most of the problems I'm experiencing though wouldn't be found until you've had a decent amount of time to experiment with the renderer (so i guess I'm gonna have to have alook at demos), which kind of rules out hardware solutions unless I hear particuly rave reviews.

[polYgonZ]

i've tried turtle. i reccomend that you try it out.
illuminatelabs.com

[Droolz]

Turtle does indeed seem to be perfect. I haven't tested it properly with animation but I wanted to point a few things out...

1. It comes with a full manual that is well written and easy to understand
2. It renders about 40% faster than mental ray on my current scenes
3. It comes with detailed tutorials on all aspects of how it works [including a full tutorial about reducing flicker with final gather - which is exactly what prompted me to look for alternate renderers in the first place].
4. It really is easy to setup and use.

I realise it dosen't have the sophistication and 'customizability' of MR, or the fantastic shaders that people are writing, but for people with not enough time learn MR and fighting with the dire manuals I recommend it.

Jules

[vaniljus]

Hey there Droolz, I'm wondering which FG tutorial you are refering to.

There reason I'm asking is that I'm the author of the Final Gather and HDRI tutorial.
I have received some good feedback on it from IlluminateLabs, but not from any Maya-user.

I would really appreciate if you can give me some feedback on it(if you have read it).

[Droolz]

The specific tutorial I'm referring to is 'Final gather in animation' and ships with the product documentation.

The main reason why I found it helpful is it demonstrates simply and efficently the stages that you can go thorugh to remove / erradicate flicker in easy to understand terms, and shows you the results (via movies). I've only looked at a few of the others but they all seem to take a simple, down to earth approach which I find highly commendable.

if it's the tutorial you wrote, thankyou very much.

Jules

[akaiwa]

I also throw in my vote for Turtle. It's quickly become my favorite renderer. I still have yet to figure out how to get it's SSS working properly, but I'm sure if I read the documentation again I'll figure it out.

What I like is how incredibly fast it is, and how it makes HDRI and FG much easier.

[thematt]

the turtle way is a good way..

for me why I think it's great is that it takes any of my shadig network..and some are really freaky..so if I send it in mental ray, I have or a crash or a black images or a totally incadescent images i really can't stand it anymore..seems that the integration is so low I sometime don't understand how people are using it..+ i hate looking at green scene on the viewport due to all the custom shader you have to use to make mental ray work properly..:shrug: .


anyway...viva turtle..
cheers

[Blur1]

I just want to put my vote in for Turtle. After the disappointment of the built-in Maya renderer and the mr bridge, Turtle is all that and almost makes Maya fun to use. A renderer should be easy to use and fast but still offer flexiblity. It has a kind of film pipeline with features like ambient/reflection occlusion, SSS, decent mblur and subpixel displacement catered for nicely. Also things like dmap shadows are more predictable, and the external renderer offers nice extra visualisation features. Will be interesting to see how it compares to Rman for Maya when it ships. Obviously VRay and Brazil are also on the horizon, but Turtle has a huge head start. Also it runs on OS X ;)
Here's to Siggraph to see what's next with Turtle.

Michael

[Dankish]

Turtle is an wonderful render, considering it's ambient occlusion/Final Gather features in wich I fell in love at first sight :). I was afraided by mentalray's complexity and Turtle came in the right moment. I'm kinda new to 3D, having a little over 1 year experience with Maya. Turtle is at least a good way to start. It's quite simple and fast renderer, that's not a myth :).
However, when I finally decided to learn mentalray harder, it was because of its integration within Maya itself. Some extras as paintfx, dynamics were among the main features that tempted and encouraged me in learning mentalray and I think it's worth it.
Anyways, I haven't heard a bad word for Turtle too, so count me as a "Turtle admirer". :))

[mixermanic]

I've only heard very good things about Turtle - is it compatible with Maya 7?

[vaniljus]

I've only heard very good things about Turtle - is it compatible with Maya 7?

Nope, not at the moment.

[Arcon]

just reviving this thread - having never heard about turtle until doing an archive search ;)

after checking out the illuminatelabs.com website, i wouldn't bother downloading a trial of turtle. the image samples they have just look really, really bad. flat lighting, no life or atmosphere and the radiosity looks almost like faked textures.

the only reason i'm against MR is the viewport preview issue, its an awesome renderer otherwise. i think i'll wait for VRay for maya; i've seen fantastic Vray renders, and i know it has a huge user-base in a lot of industries.

[Droolz]

edit: having re read the thread I've just pointlessly repeated myself.. it goes a little something like:

ra ra ra, turtle's great, the images on the site don't do it justice, try it out, ra ra ra.

Jules

[anthonymcgrath]

everyone is raving about turtle here but can anyone shed any light on artvps's render cards and drives? any info you can give would be greatly appreciated as I'm thinking of buying an art card for my home pc

[Hirni_NG]

edit: having re read the thread I've just pointlessly repeated myself.. it goes a little something like:

ra ra ra, turtle's great, the images on the site don't do it justice, try it out, ra ra ra.

Jules

Well, I only have limited experience with Turtle, but it is definitly a usable renderer. It depends on what you want. If you want to have quick setups that look nice, Turtle is a way to go. From a programmers viewpoint, mental ray is excellent. One can treat MR as a rendering library where one has full control over pretty much everything (being able to write yout own lenses, geometry shaders, photon shaders etc.).

[Droolz]

everyone is raving about turtle here but can anyone shed any light on artvps's render cards and drives? any info you can give would be greatly appreciated as I'm thinking of buying an art card for my home pc

Just got back from ART Vps today, pretty blown away by the quality of the rendering, it's exceptionly good BUT it's pretty much specifically aimed at the product design / visualisation market, in fact it seems to have the car visualisation market pretty much sewn up with most of the major players in this field using it.
It has solid HDRI integration. Nothing like final gather. seems to have its own proprietery GI soloution that form what i've seen works very well. They were hazy about render times but seem quite happy for you to send them your scene files and they'll chuck out some renders, including times for you to see what you think. Fully compatible with the maya shader nodes plus a load of specifc 'physical model' shaders a la mental ray. A lot of these are specific to product visualisation (they have a specific 'car paint' shader which is very nice for example).
They also reckon they're quick to produce shaders when the need arises (no SSS at the moment but they're looking into it). No subdivision at render time (yet).
I got the impression that they were geared up for larger companies and not really the individual, but they were lovely none the less.

So my summary would be very very good product visualisation stuff (totally 'hyper photoreal' - best car renders I've ever seen), but far from being an all purpose renderer. Does a specific job and does it very well.

hth

Jules

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