Maya Software vs Mental Ray Rendering?

[Emil3d]

What's the difference other than Maya Software seeming to have alot more options then Mental Ray?...That’s a huge answer you are asking for but I would just mention a few things. Basically they are 2 different rendering engines. May be you can think of different renderers dealing with the same scene as in real life, different painters paint the same scene. With that comes different capabilities, performances, and results. Basically Mental Ray has more sophisticated features as shadow motions blur, GI and many more. On the other hand Maya as a native renderer can render all kind of geometrys and effects, while Mental Ray has some limitations with that

[Xecode]

How am I to know which one to use with a particular animation?

[jdj]

How am I to know which one to use with a particular animation?

Really you need to know them both in order to make that judgement. The contents of your scene and what special features you want dictates which renderer to use.

Mental ray for instance offers indirect illumination and efficient displacement map handling etc. but if you want to use paint effects for instance, Maya software is the way to go.

Cheers
/ Daniel

[Arcon]

Mental ray for instance offers indirect illumination and efficient displacement map handling etc. but if you want to use paint effects for instance, Maya software is the way to go.
/ Daniel

i would always convert to polys for PaintFX and render with MR, then you get the benefit of multi-threaded paintFX renders :) maya sware could do that too but i find i render everything with MR now, its the only way to do multi-pass rendering on large scenes with a high level of quality.

[cpan]

you'd better render with mentalray (be sure to set number of threads to 4 in the render menu) cause it's much faster, it offers better quality, better memory handling, etc. And if you have pfx in your scene and also maya 7, you could easily put the pfx + matte surfaces on a layer (and assign maya software for it) and the rest on another layer ( and set the renderer to mentalray) to make the composition.

[Xecode]

Is there some sort of site that compares these 2 so I have a better idea of knowing what I should use when? I'm still in my early days with Maya doing intermediate tutorials, some of the stuff you guys speak of is beyond me yet.

[Arcon]

Is there some sort of site that compares these 2 so I have a better idea of knowing what I should use when?

well if you're at the tutorial level with maya it might be an idea to at least get exposed to the software renderer first so you get to know the principles of rendering in maya. but basically, mental ray can work with most native maya shaders, and it can render a lot of effects that maya simply can't do. achieving some levels of realism with the maya software renderer is simply impossible in certain timeframes, which is where you need the power of MR :) with experience its usually better to use MR all of the time, so a comparison chart would be invalid ;) but its a pretty in-depth renderer.... there'd be heaps on google, and there's a few mental ray books out as well.

[pixelmonk]

How am I to know which one to use with a particular animation?


I only use MR to render now (95%). It's faster than the software renderer even for simple scenes. People have the misconception that you only use MR if you want FG, Caustics or GI.

[NUKE-CG]

If mentalRay cannot render something, make it happen. If you still cannot get what you want, then use Software. Last resort renderer in my books.

[Xecode]

roger that, thanks guys!

Is there some site that has a mental ray bench mark or a program I can run or something. Something that says "this is on average how fast your computer can do render this image/scene"?

[LehaS]

In the general ALIAS MAYA forum there was a thread about it.......people took the same scene and compared their rendertime....check it out...still has to be on the first lines :)

[Arcon]

Is there some site that has a mental ray bench mark or a program I can run or something. Something that says "this is on average how fast your computer can do render this image/scene"?


there are so many variables in both peoples' hardware and the 3D scene that make any comparison charts useless. its best to make a scene yourself and render it in both renderers, checking the times against each other yourself, while also comparing the quality etc, and adding elements as you go like raytraced shadows, etc.

i've done this a lot a while back, and i know the software renderer is actually much faster at doing regualr geometry with color textures etc. but even certain textures have some quality limitations with maya, you really need to go with MR if you're thinking of using raytraced reflections and especially raytraced shadows. in a nutshell the maya software renderer is a crap raytracer. Alias havn't improved that area of the package since 1.0 really.

[Xecode]

alright thanks guys.

[fahr]

I agree that Mental Ray is a more advanced and capable renderer, but a couple of things about Maya Software should be noted.

Motion Blur. Mental Ray's motion blur is high quality but so freaking slow its unusable. Maya Software offers a nice 2d blur thats fast. Its possible to render out the motion vectors from Maya software and use them to blur your mental ray images, but its a bit of a pain to do so.

Shared memory. Maya does not need to export the scene in order to render with maya software, therefore saving ram. Many scenes that throw memory exceptions in mental ray render fine with maya software.

Easy access to some select rendering features like BOT files. I can just check "use BOT files" and my super huge texture maps will use very little ram during the render. Mental ray has a similar format, but you must manually convert your textures over to it and re-assign your shaders first.

UNLIMITED render nodes. If you have a render farm of any kind, Maya software costs you nothing extra to render on every cpu in your studio. Mental ray has free rendering ONLY for the computer you run maya on, and ONLY if you render it through maya, adding an extra RAM footprint to your render. If you want to render with extra cpus, you first need to export your scene to an .mi format and use mental ray standalone server, which costs thousands, and then its 1k per cpu on top of that.

Maya Software renders every effect in Maya (with the exception of hardware particles, which is rendered via the maya hardware renderer).

Again, mental ray is a far more capable renderer than maya software, but if you are not using mental ray for anything advanced like GI, displacements or huge raytraced scenes (all of which require huge render farms to get any kind of animation out on time), then you may want to consider using maya software. Its a reasonably fast scanline renderer and is capapable of many things like raytracing, ambient occlusion and subsurface scattering.

As my studio grows I'll almost certainly switch over to mental ray (or renderman) at some point, but if your a small shop, and defintely if your new to 3d, maya software is still a viable option.

[Kinematics]

how to we go about to get BOT textures which only work on maya's software renderer to work on mentalray?

Sorry fahr but could you give me a step by step based on this line im quoting from you "Easy access to some select rendering features like BOT files. I can just check "use BOT files" and my super huge texture maps will use very little ram during the render. Mental ray has a similar format, but you must manually convert your textures over to it and re-assign your shaders first." or anyone else for that matter :D thanks ppl

[Hezza]

I think he meant Mental Ray has its own way of coping with large texture files. I don't know much about them but he might be talking about .map files. My only experience with them is through using Z-brush/displacement maps in mental ray and being told to convert my TIFF's into MAPS. From my vague memory of what people said about them, when mental ray loads a texture file for rendering it 'memory maps' the image so it knows what sections will be used in the render, but this process takes up time and ram. By converting your textures to maps before render time it allows MR to cope with bigger images.

You can convert your images with the imf_copy command, but some kind soul on Zbrush Central made a little batch file to do it.

Make a text file on your computer and rename it convert.bat

Copy the folloing lines into it

:convertfile
@IF %1 == "" GOTO end
imf_copy -p %1 "%~d1%~p1%~n1.map"
@SHIFT
@GOTO convertfile
:end
@ECHO.
@ECHO Done!
@pause

Then all you need to do is drag you texture onto the convert.bat file and it'lls dump out the file with a .map extension (ie, you drop Face.tiff, and it dumps out Face.map)

I'm not sure what the -p flag does so you might want to look into it before using.

Hez

EDIT: I take no responsibility for the batch file, i've used it loads with no problems but on the off chance that it makes your computer explode don't look at me ;)

[Xecode]

I've become more familiar with the two. I've seen people post in here saying mental ray is faster but I spent all night doing comparisons seeing which one does what better and how long. Maya Software always kick the frames out much faster. So much that it seems worth the increase in speed if it means a nano of degrade with effects.

[vicky_1]

Xecode,
i agree about render speed. Nonetheless, MR can give CG realism that s/w render takes lot of tweaking & cheating to achieve.
Personally I found MR really good where reflection/refraction are a priority in the scene. And it finally is the need of the artist against the time available.

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