Mental ray Subd's

[beaker]

MR doesnt support subds in maya at the moment

from the MR for maya docs:

Unsupported features

mental ray for Maya does not support the following Maya rendering features:

* all postprocessing effects: Paint Effects, shader/light glow, optical effects, 2d motion blur, and fur rendering.
* software rendering of particle systems
* direct rendering of Maya subdivision surfaces
* Interactive Photorealistic Rendering (IPR)
* Field Rendering
* Pre/Post Render MEL scripts
* Fluid Effects

[semuta]

Beaker, ya I know Mental ray doesn't support native Maya Subdivision surfaces. there are several (poorly) documented Mental ray Subdivision methods which are applied at render time, this is supposed to work through assigning a "mentalraySubdivAprox " node to the shape node of a given poly object. you can assign them by using the approximation editor in the rendering editor dropdown menu, they just don't seem to work, or maybe I don't fully know how to implement them.



_james
Image Engine

[wrend]

havent being using MR since first maya plug, but i think you'll find
you require a certain sdslib to render the result fo such approximatns, a lib you'll find in an independently sold mentalMatter, by MImages. have a look on their site, and notice the rendering error that spat out the looking for the lib, and that used to chase up where it was to be found.

[semuta]

Interesting, so I need this MentalMatter plugin for mental ray to do this, hmm.. what a pain in the ass. I looked on their web page and it doesn't look like they have upgraded it since 99. it's too bad it's not just part of mental ray 3.1 now
anyway thanks for the info.

_james
Image Engine

[Isrithe]

Why not just use the smooth proxy instead of the sub d's. Mental Ray still renders the smooth proxy. The way I see it, its like sub d's just without the standard mode and those damn blind data nodes that slow sub d's down.

[semuta]

Oh, I agree for sure, smoothing is definately a good stable way to go, actually I very rarely use maya's native subd's but the mental ray subd's seem more akin to, say, lightwave's metanurbs, at least one of the methods of aproximation does. the addaptive tesselation might be quite useful as well as the subpixel teselation stuff I've read mental ray is cabable of.

_james

[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.