Messiah render WIP

[pixym]

Hello,
This is my first post on the Messiah forum.
The still have some noise, but perhaps it is a wanted effect...
I would like to test messiah renderer because I am a lightwave user. Unfortunatly there is no demo version of messiah studio :(

[ThomasHelzle]

Hm, you are using some crazy values without getting much for it I think.

A GI depth of 9 is rather pointless, above 3 you will not notice much improvement anymore for a scene like yours.

AA 8 is also quite overdone, you should be able to use something like 2-4 - I often end up using 3 with Enhanced mode. Adaptive Threshold set to 0.015.
Remember that the AA number is squared! Your settings use up to 64 samples per pixel.

I wonder what your sphere lights are set to, since your other settings are so high, all that noise is a bit weird. Is it possible that you have set the sphere light shadows to very low quality and getting the noise from that?

Also, your reflections are not realistic. The chrome is outblown white and the red car paint itself hardly reflects anything.
I don't know what your chrome settings are, but I would suggest using a very dark material with small, sharp highlights (if any) and then balance the reflection until you get more contrast.

For cars, you may need to use a more contrasting environment, since it is all about cool reflections. HDRIs can be nice or a dark environment with just some bright elements.

But don't take my critique as "downer". Keep at it and let us see your progress.
I'm sure that will become a very nice render with optimized settings.

P.S. To get light into the car, you have to activate "Transmissive Shadows" for the windows with raytraced shadows. Otherwise the transparency isn't calculated for shadows through glas.
Shadowmaps don't work through transparency yet at all.

[bloodboy]

hej thanx... i know that my settings are mostly useless that high but i was trying to doing some testing usuing Messiah Vs. Mental Ray... the settings i used are the translation of settings i would nomally use for still renders in maya... i also know that the meterials are unfinished and the chrome are not really chrome it is just a material with reflaction turn up top to 1. i made these materials in less that 2 min. the main point of this render was to see what renderer would render faster with high and almost impossiable settings..

there is one thing you can help me with or maybe explain... bump mapping and displacment mapping.... i don't quite understand how it works... i think there is something i need to turn on... i under the basics of bump and displacement mapping but i know i am missing something here..... what i am not sure.....

[ThomasHelzle]

If comparing apples to oranges makes you happy... ;)

Bump mapping works in combination with displacement in that they use the same input. Plug your Bumpmap into the bump input in the base material and control the strength of the bump with the bump value in the base materials interface. This is different than most other values.

Displacement works only on Metanurbs. Select your object (made of quads) and hit Tab Key. Then go to the Surface Tab, select the object, select the Displacement Tab and set Max Displace to 1.0, Displacement Type to Pre-Generated Polygons and Sub Level to a value that fit's your needs, available memory and model resolution, start with 4-10.
Your Bumpmap also defines the Displacement: First the object is subdivided, then displaced, and for all detail where there is not enough subdivisions, bump mapping is used instead. Works great in most cases, but I still would like the two parameters to be separate.

You can also grab the Displacement scene from Taron from the pmG Homepage and dissect it. For something like the car, Displacement will most certainly not work in a useful manner.

Good luck.

[bloodboy]

Apples and oranges are always fun to play with... i mean i am sure that Messiah cannot replace Mental Ray in production... but it is also good to know what it can do... i mean there is not real point to have a renderer and have no idea what can and cannot do... i have been using mental ray for quite some time and would not change it for anything else... but with the wave of one new renderers that are popping up everyday you sometimes cannot help wanting to test every other one and see what all the talk is about.... i mean Messiah may not be on a mental ray level but i could see my self usuing it in some productions...
messiah may not be up with mental ray "yet" (if it ever gets there).. but i think is is worth the money you pay for it...

[ThomasHelzle]

No, you didn't get my point.
I don't think comparing messiah with Mental Ray is a bad idea - a lot of things in messiah are actually better, especially the shaderflow itself - but comparison makes only sense to me if you have the same scene in both apps and try to get the same quality.

If both images look perfect, then you can say something about speed, quality etc.
Just cranking up some values doesn't make any sense to me.
And don't tell me you use an Antialiasing setting of 8 in Mental Ray LOL - is that even possible - I never got higher than 4...

I am looking forward to XSI 5 with MR 3.4 which is said to be much faster...

But no hard feeling - just have fun :bowdown:

Cheers,

[bloodboy]

i did use the same scene in both maya and messiah..... i was just having fun really.... in messiah the AA sampling is(well i think so, could be wrong here) the same as the Min/max samples with mental ray (maya) i have never used a setting higher than 2-4 for max samples really....

and you are right messiah does have a very good shader flow, in maya shaders are easy to create but sometimes when making complex shadeing networks it can be difficult to understand what goes where and you have to graph and re-graph the shader when you want to see the connections....

there is not hard feelings here, i am happy that you take time to respont to posts.... i get help with messiah stuff.... sometimes there will be miss understandings but that happens....
spesking of XSI 5.0.... that is looking good... and there is a new maya style camera transformation tools and interface.... and the new rigid bodies tools.....
XSI has always been the tool i wanted to work with, since 1.0 but i never really got around to it.. then i started with maya and never really look back... but with 4.2 and now 5.0... i am thinking about getting a copy..... but i like the freedom i have in maya... MEL is simply the best...
How is the scripting in XSI?

[ThomasHelzle]

Scripting in XSI looks very good to me so far.
Maya has a lot of strong points that are still unbeatable, but the overall workflow and feeling is much nicer in XSI IMO. And it has all I really need.

http://www.softimage.com/Products/Xsi/v5/nfvt/default.asp has the latest videos for 5.0 One of them deals with the new universal scripting editor which looks very nice.
You can use Basic Script, Java Script or Python (and some others I think) and surely you can do C++ tools too...

Maybe just get a seat of Foundation and look how you like it - it is an unbeatable value. Modeling is fantastic, and everything else is also quite nice.
With PointOvenPro, going back and forward isn't much of a pain anymore.

Let's hope pmG has some News for Siggraph too!

Cheers,

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