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View Full Version : Mental Ray 3.1 standalone as a server to multiple applications

Ryben
03-29-2003, 08:51 PM
Does anyone know how to setup Mental Ray standalones to act as slaves to more applications at once (for example Max, Maya, softimage|3D & XSI). It seems that every application demands a different deamon on a different port (Max wants rayserver.exe, Maya wants ray3_1maya4_5server.exe, XSI wants ray3xsi3_0server.exe and so on..). I can setup Mental Ray standalone to have support for all of them when rendering .mi files, but i can serve to only one application since i don't know how to make different deamons that will point to the same ray.exe for rendering.
I have read all the docs in the distributions and i have read "Rendering with Mental Ray" book, and i still cannot figure this out...
I guess someone must know, since installing multiple copies of the same mentalray version just to have different deamons for different applications seems silly...

Thanks in advance for your help!
Atyss
03-30-2003, 04:22 AM
I believe that to do that, you'd need to run mental ray from the command line. That is, export mi2 files and render them with ray3.exe.

The problem is that each software has specific ways to deal with mental ray; mi files, on the other hand, use a mental ray language, and most software can generate them.

Also, note that for mi2 files to render properly, you need all shaders from all softwares registered in the mental ray registry. I believe that if you have a mental ray version for each of the 3D softwares that shouldn't be a problem. Since each 3D software ship is own version of mental ray, you will have to manually register all libraries into one mental ray. I don't know if the registration is the same for all applications.

Note also that if you can change the software path to mental to point to only one mental ray application, then you might be able to render straight from all the softwares, just by hitting the render button.

Another option might to have a render manager that works with all the softwares and the renderer. Then, in the applications, everytime you want to render you may spool your scene to mental ray via the render manager.

I never had to do that, so this was hypothetical.


Hope this helps
Salutations - Cheers
Bernard Lebel
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