CGTalk - Final version of MR for Maya out

MaDSheeP

12-17-2002, 07:44 PM

grrr... i wish it supported SubD's....

tho.. it also doesn't support Non SubD's... i am working through Organic 1 from Gnomon... and in that i used Nurbs... but MR still doesn't allow me to render it... guess SubD's of any kind are forbidden... bah bah bah...

anyway.. a final 1.5 is that much closer to a final 2.0... which will hopefully be faster, and support SubD's...

on the other hand... does anyone know if SubD's will be sent to MR using true curve geometry? i'm not quite sure what i am talking about, but anyone who knows how renderman does it, versus how default renderers do SubD's... i am curious as to if anyone knows how MR will handle true SubD Geometry :)

beaker

12-17-2002, 08:56 PM

>>on the other hand... does anyone know if SubD's will be sent to MR using true curve geometry?

There are only a few renderers out there that do this with nurbs but I don't believe any of them are commercial(Blue Sky's Cgstudio renders the true curved surface without tesselating it, but only nurbs as far as I know).

>>i'm not quite sure what i am talking about, but anyone who knows how renderman does it, versus how default renderers do SubD's... i am curious as to if anyone knows how MR will handle true SubD Geometry

Prman tesselates all geometry to polygons before rendering. MR does the same thing. So I am sure thats how it will handle Subdivs.

Array

12-17-2002, 09:03 PM

on the other hand... does anyone know if SubD's will be sent to MR using true curve geometry?

hehe, this brings back some memories. its pretty simple to do this with primitives like spheres and cubes, especially when raytracing. gets a bit more difficult when you get to some more complex models :thumbsdow differential geometry here we come!

MCronin

12-18-2002, 01:09 AM

Originally posted by beaker
There are only a few renderers out there that do this with nurbs but I don't believe any of them are commercial(Blue Sky's Cgstudio renders the true curved surface without tesselating it, but only nurbs as far as I know).

I'm pretty sure Houdini's Mantra and PRMan can render a variety of curved surfaces directly. Curves, NURBs, trimmed NURBs, and Subdivision Surfaces are supposed to be directly supported by both renderers according to Larry Gritz's Renderman book and SideFX's Mantra documents.

beaker

12-18-2002, 03:28 AM

MCronin:

Maybe I got this wrong, but MaDSheeP was asking about directly rendering the subds without tesselating to polygons. Prman tesselates all geometry to micropolygons.

MCronin

12-18-2002, 04:42 AM

I don't know... my PRMan experience is limited, but my understanding is that Micro Polygon dicing is more a shading function, and is entirely different than tesselating a curved surface into polygons to retain it's smoothness. In the book I was referring to, there's a short section on it, where Larry Gritz explains that most renderers only support tristrips or polyhedra and tesselate curved surfaces into polygons, but as a production renderer, PRMan supports curved surfaces directly because 1) The results are much nicer. 2) It's more efficient. To tesselate a high order surfaces creates huge geometry databases, that take a long time to process, chewing up the most important commodities in production, time, horepower, bandwidth and storage. 3) They expect certain features of the renderer to excel with certain surface primitive types. The example he uses in the book is that a raytracer can tear through a curved surface very quickly, but if the surface is tesselated to triangles, it takes exponentially longer for that same raytracer to process it.

skello

12-18-2002, 04:49 AM

Instead of converting your poly-cage to sub dees use the new smooth proxy command to smooth it and render with mental ray
....there is no difference between the smooth proxy object and a sub dee version

Array

12-18-2002, 05:01 AM

there is no difference between the smooth proxy object and a sub dee version

actually truely procedural subd is tesselated based on proximity of the camera to the mesh. when it is farther away, there is less tesselation, i.e. less memory consumption, up close some algorithms may ever selectively smooth only the visible regions of a mesh to further save time. you usually dont get these benefits with a simple meshsmooth node/operator or whatever one's modeller calls it.

MaDSheeP

12-18-2002, 06:02 AM

wow.. all this info.. thanks everyone!

and yeah, Array had the right idea.. at least.. thats what i was getting at...

the whole tessilating the mesh, the closer to it you get with the camera... :)

i was just curious how MR deals with curves

jashiin

12-18-2002, 07:29 AM

realsoft 3d renders nurbs analytically... subdivision surfaces are actually converted to nurbs for rendering, so subdivision surfaces render analytically too!

www.realsoft.com

koopsta.
---------------------
http://www.pidelipom.com/jolsson/

Gentle Fury

12-18-2002, 08:45 AM

Originally posted by AAbel
I'm wondering if future versions of MR for maya will be free. Will it still be free for maya 5.0?

this has already been addressed in a previous press release. All future versions of Maya will include mental ray as one of 2 standard renderers. It is planned that as of a few releases once all the bugs are worked out it will be THE standard renderer in maya (you dont HAVE to use GI in MR, so there are only a few reasons left to even have th maya renderer still).

And as to what ive read it would seem that the mental ray rendering rights are the same as mayas standard renderer, unlimited render nodes. Seeing as how it is now a part of maya there is no reason for it not to be.

beaker

12-18-2002, 10:58 AM

>>but my understanding is that Micro Polygon dicing is more a shading function, and is entirely different than tesselating a curved surface into polygons to retain it's smoothness.

Micropolygon dicing is where the model is tesselated down to 1 polygon per pixel.

>>In the book I was referring to, there's a short section on it, where Larry Gritz explains that most renderers only support tristrips or polyhedra and tesselate curved surfaces into polygons, but as a production renderer, PRMan supports curved surfaces directly because

I believe what larry was refering too is that many software packages just use a mesh smooth and call it a subdiv surface. Prman's subdivs are truly curved surfaces at the mathmatical level and not just a smoothed polygon surface.

beaker

12-18-2002, 11:02 AM

>>so there are only a few reasons left to even have th maya renderer still

One big reason is that $2500 per render node license that MR costs for a render farm.

>>and as to what ive read it would seem that the mental ray rendering rights are the same as mayas standard renderer, unlimited render nodes. Seeing as how it is now a part of maya there is no reason for it not to be.

This is incorrect. You do not get unlimited rendering nodes for MR. It still costs $2500 per render license of the MR standalone. The only render nodes you get are the ones included with the copy of maya. So you can only use the MR built into maya on as many machines as you have maya licensed on.

MaDSheeP

12-18-2002, 02:18 PM

uhmmmm... so why not buy Maya Complete at $1,999 and make workstations with that money, and use them as MR render nodes, instead of paying $2,500 for a single render node license for MR

unless they already thought of that... ;)

AAbel

12-18-2002, 04:13 PM

That's kinda what I was thinking. Why buy another MR license for $2500 when you can get maya complete for $2000? I don't think they thought this out very well. Anyway good to hear that MR will remain free for us.

MCronin

12-18-2002, 04:59 PM

With the stand alone render nodes you get true distributed rendering. Which means you can use all the machines with render nodes to render every single frame together. You can't do that with Maya's renderer or the MR Plugin renderer. Also, with the standalone version, you can have other software (Houdini, in house modeling and animation tools) in your pipeline supported by the Renderer, again, something the plugin can't do.

beaker

12-18-2002, 05:02 PM

>>That's kinda what I was thinking. Why buy another MR license for $2500 when you can get maya complete for $2000?

The price of MR goes down alot as you buy more copies of it. I think as low as $1500 or lesswhen you get up to 20-30 nodes(don't quote me on that).

Also another limitation, is if you have a mixed envioronment of unlimited and complete nodes, I'm not sure if MR installed under complete will be able to render unlimited features. Since you can't write out .mi files unless you have the standalone and the the complete license won't be able to load up features like fluids and cloth(also fur once MR supports that). Also from a/w's page it looks like there are additional features that you will only be able to access with the MR standalone

beaker

12-18-2002, 05:04 PM

I just found this on a/w's site in the MR for Maya FAQ:

>How can I purchase mental ray standalone 3.1?

>The release of mental ray 3.1 standalone is currently being prepared and will start shipping shortly. It is sold on a per CPU licensing basis. Prices start as low as $1,000 per CPU (quantity purchase required). Contact your local A|W representative or visit www.aliaswavefront.com for more information.

I wonder how many copies you have to buy to get it for $1000.

mustique

12-18-2002, 05:37 PM

Hi guys.

I always wondered how maya managed not to improve its renderer over the years. In terms of GI, radiosity stuff, much faster calculating etc...

So if it was so hard for AW to make improvements that would keep the renderer so well integrated with everything in Maya,
I ask myself how the guys at mental images will do that. Will fur and paint effects be as beatifully implemented as with mayas native renderer? Or will they manually apllied via compositing? Don't missunderstand. I hope they get it to work smoothly, who wouldn't enjoy that! But this sounds like an evolution to me that should called Maya for Mray, instead of Mray for maya.

As for the pricing issue: By the time Mray succeedes to be a fully integrated, speedy raytrace and GI renderer for AW, I guess we will get a new app called Inca may be, costing as much as XSI. Just my 2 cents.

ThirdEye

12-18-2002, 05:51 PM

Maya doesn't take its name from the maya populations, Maya is the world of imagination. Make some google reasearch on the "veil of Maya" ;)

beaker

12-18-2002, 06:08 PM

>>So if it was so hard for AW to make improvements that would keep the renderer so well integrated with everything in Maya,
I ask myself how the guys at mental images will do that. Will fur and paint effects be as beatifully implemented as with mayas native renderer? Or will they manually apllied via compositing?

Fur and paintfx are allready rendered by a separate rendering engine in post and then z composited by the software(in the maya renderer). So I don't see this as that big of a deal to integrate into MR.

MaDSheeP

12-18-2002, 08:02 PM

so... just how popular is Mental Ray in a production environment?

i meen... i know that the numbers vary a lot, etc etc...

but i am curious just how many production houses use Mental Ray instead of... Final Render, or a RenderMan renderer... just curious :)

Array

12-18-2002, 08:08 PM

I wonder how many copies you have to buy to get it for $1000.

When one buys 40 or more nodes of mentalray, the price is reduced to $950 per node.

EDIT:

here's the source:

http://store.softimage.com/store/lang/EN/mr_v31.asp

beaker

12-18-2002, 09:09 PM

Thanks for that link array. Nice that the price of a single license went down to $1895. Unfortunatly, they work like Prman and it is priced per processor.

Gentle Fury

12-19-2002, 01:04 AM

im still pretty sure that is only referring to the stand alone......the maya plugin is free for maya users. You DONT need the standalone to use it!

I have not seen anything anywhere that said it was free until you render on multiple threads.

beaker

12-19-2002, 01:14 AM

Yea, it is refering to the standalone, never said otherwise. I'm just talking about when you need to render on multiple machines, like when you have a small farm or something(which many of us need).

playmesumch00ns

12-19-2002, 11:00 AM

Originally posted by MaDSheeP
so... just how popular is Mental Ray in a production environment?

i meen... i know that the numbers vary a lot, etc etc...

but i am curious just how many production houses use Mental Ray instead of... Final Render, or a RenderMan renderer... just curious :)

I was wondering this myself. But basically everyone uses PRMan, as there's no point in trying to render GI at film res. The GI-type shading effects you see in such films as Pearl Harbor etc. are created with a rather ingenious shortcut known as occlusion-culling (similar principle to RayDiffuse).

But then, I read in that PR blurb on Pixar's website that MPC used Renderman 11's (is that then PRMan 4?) GI functions for Harry Potter II. Do you think they actually rendered GI, or just did a couple of lightmaps?

As for the reason A|W never bothered to sort the renderer out before, it's cos they were too busy making Maya into the best character animation package. Hence everyone uses Maya for animation and then PRMan for rendering (GOD why couldn't they have done a deal with Pixar instead of MI!?). This is exactly what happened with SoftImage. They spent a lot of effort making it a great modelling and animation package, and as a result, the renderer was a smely pile of poo, so they licensed MR from MentalImages.

This is definitely a step in the right direction for A|W. Hopefully they'll concentrate on NLA for Maya 5!

MCronin

12-19-2002, 01:19 PM

Originally posted by playmesumch00ns
But then, I read in that PR blurb on Pixar's website that MPC used Renderman 11's (is that then PRMan 4?) GI functions for Harry Potter II. Do you think they actually rendered GI, or just did a couple of lightmaps?

Renderman 11 is PRMan 11. They use the terms Renderman and Pixar's Renderman interchangably sometimes. What happened was they were on PRMan version 3.9XX. They had been reatining the number 3.XX for years because PRMan renderers were based on 3.XX of the Renderman Spec. When it came time for the next version (10) the version number would have been 3.10 and they didn't want to confuse their users. People would've thought PRMan 3.10<3.9 even though 3.10 was the latest version. So they just dropped the Spec number and called it PRMan 10, and now PRMan 11.

For the GI, I'm sure MPC probably did use PRMan 11's GI in a few scenes. It's supposed to be super fast compared to other renderers, and VFX comapnies have been using GI in limited instances for years, either via MR or BMRT.

beaker

12-19-2002, 05:01 PM

>>I was wondering this myself. But basically everyone uses PRMan, as there's no point in trying to render GI at film res.

True that GI isn't used much, but some people still use it. Notably Buf uses it in film(Fight club trash can fly out).

>>The GI-type shading effects you see in such films as Pearl Harbor etc. are created with a rather ingenious shortcut known as occlusion-culling (similar principle to RayDiffuse).

ILM still used MR to create all the shadows of the planes and they used MR to bake the GI shadows into the textures that they used in addition to ambient occlusion. The size of the scenes in Pearl Harbor were just way too big, so the shadow maps would have to be at such a high resolution that it was faster to raytrace the shadows.

>>(GOD why couldn't they have done a deal with Pixar instead of MI!?).

Probably because of cost. Especially with maya being 2k now, 75% of the people out there will have a hard time justifying spending 2x(US$5k per processor) the cost of maya on render nodes.

beaker

12-19-2002, 05:02 PM

>>So they just dropped the Spec number and called it PRMan 10, and now PRMan 11.

In addition to that, it was Prman's 10th year anniversary when they first announced it. So that was an added bonus. :)

Array

12-19-2002, 05:54 PM

he GI-type shading effects you see in such films as Pearl Harbor etc. are created with a rather ingenious shortcut known as occlusion-culling (similar principle to RayDiffuse).

what the? where did you get this info? occlusion culling refers to the reyes (render everythign you ever see) algorithm's ability to selectively slice and dice geometry on the basis of visibility, therefore creating much quicker renders. As you may have guessed, occlusion culling is impracticle when ray tracing or making photon maps.

As for "GI" being "simulated" with PRMan10 and below, a lot of houses tend to use mentalray to bake textures, and then render out the animations in PRMan. this was the case for starwars episode I and II.

alphatron

12-19-2002, 06:14 PM

Array,

I think he is getting the terms "occlusion-culling" and "ambient occlusion" mixed up.

playmesumch00ns

12-20-2002, 08:58 AM

Originally posted by Array
what the? where did you get this info? occlusion culling refers to the reyes (render everythign you ever see) algorithm's ability to selectively slice and dice geometry on the basis of visibility, therefore creating much quicker renders.

doh. alphatron's right...mean ambient-occlusion shading a la Pearl Harbor and Stuart Little 2. In my defence, I'd only just woken up...