Best Renderer For Small Studio

[Sharky0815]

You do realise that the only people qualified to answer you question would be the ones who used all of the renderes you listed. Everyone else will probably just select Mentalray because they haven't tried anything else.

That said, I'm currently checking out Turtle. It seems fast, has good integration with Maya, better than Mentalray in some cases, worse in others. As a freelancer I rely heavily on passes so I can do most of the changes in Post. I find Mentalray and Maya in general lacking in this department. Turtle seems to have good passes, though I haven't tried yet.

I didn't vote, by the way.

Take care,
George

[Jozvex]

I think we can quite easily rule out Maxwell, I've used it and the speed is Mental Ray that's been hit by a bus and is rendering while in a coma. Looks great though after the 24 hour renders per frame.

I used the Turtle demo and it was pretty cool but it doesn't been MR in my opinion. Especially MR in Maya 7 with render layers etc. The only thing better than MR would be VRay I think.

[oneczech]

Mental Ray seems to be a fairly good solution for static pics .. at least I would not care about time if there is only one frame. Plus layers and stuff, I agree with Sharky0815 ...

Turtle is fast but I agree that the look of MR seems to have a better touch, in my opinion, BUT that may not be that important with animation .. also the settings seems to be more intuitive and less complicated plus the price ... ...

guessing from the info it may not be that bad to go with Turtle for animation and stay with MR for graphics. ...

thanks for your feedback ..
david

[akewt]

hello there. i have had production experience with MR and Turtle. I have been Beta testing Turtle 2 for the last 2 months with illuminate labs and must say its really coming along nicely. I would agree that for looks you will get a better look from MR. But it comes as a price. I my experience MR can be very complicated and to get decent results i hasd to get into installing all the lovely custom shaders that people like pixero and francesca make. if I had their experience with MR i would no doubt be able to produce renders as quick as i can in turtle. I also found with MR that you always have to up sampling rates to get rid of fizzing textures. this was the bain of my life and just couldnt afford to up the sample rates to get non-fizzing renders. this was with my lack of knowledge so please dont people start flaming me. i didnt have time to debug.

i have to say that turtle IS quick. the GI FG and occlusion in it are as good if not better than MR. certainly quicker!! and the BIG ++++++++ for turtle is the micro-poly displacement. IT RULES!! its nowhere near renderman sub-pixel displacement but it cetainly IS good and fast. this would be the only reason i would need to use turtle over MR. MR's displacement IMO is really slow.

just to add onto this, renderman for maya is due for release VERY soon and this will be the biggest release for me ever. with most of rendermans features apart from the production type ones like rib etc it will rock. and they say it supports nearly all of mayas native shaders. but EVEN BETTER than that you will be able to RENDER yes RENDER most particle types straight out in renderman. thats right!!! rndering ACTUAL particles. i have much anticipation for this release and maybe you shoul dhold-on till it comes out.

hope this helps.
kev

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.