Mental Ray

[Marcel]

Not that I know of. I do know that Mental Ray can't use Max's procedurals, but texture maps should be no problem. Weird...
Can't it be a problem that Mental Ray doesn't know where to look for the textures (path problems) ?

Marcel

[toonman]

Originally posted by cdinic
I just snagged a copy of Mental Ray for 3D studio Max 4.2. I have gotten it to successfully render any object with any procedural texture but once I apply a texture using any raster graphic the object renders as pure black. I used Brazil for a while and it required a specific map to be used in order to render textures, does mental ray have a similar problem... umm.. I mean feature?

Thanks for your time!

-Chris

mr can render bitmaps just fine, as well as most of max's procedurals... you should check the log to see what kind of message is mr printing to it... it should be there... a dumb question here, just checking... does your object have UV coords applied?

SM

[FortUno]

Originally posted by Marcel
Not that I know of. I do know that Mental Ray can't use Max's procedurals, but texture maps should be no problem. Weird...
Can't it be a problem that Mental Ray doesn't know where to look for the textures (path problems) ?

Marcel

Mental Ray can render Max's procedurals.. I just did.

Hmmm.. just out of curiosity, I tried rendering a Darktree (http://www.darksim.com) with Mental Ray, and it crashed... This will require more research...

[cdinic]

I do have UVW cord applied, spherical since I am testing on a sphere. I noticed 2 lines printed in the MR message window

"API 0.0 warn 302004: [stdin], line 54: declaring nonexistent function max_bitmapPyramid"

also

"RC 0.1 error: 081011L shader 'max_bitmapPyramid' not found"

Seems like I have some problems...What is this bit Map Pyramid and how do I locate it.

Thanks for your help

-Chris

[undoz]

in the bitmap rollout put the fitering on none instead of pyramidal

[chrom]

find version 2.1.45.1
no problem with filtering for me

[cdinic]

:buttrock: Sloved!!! Thank you Undoz! Chrom, I am currently in search of V 2.1.45.1, thanks for the tip.

Any one know of any nice MR tutorials?

Thanks

-Chris

[toonman]

Originally posted by Lord Twilight


Mental Ray can render Max's procedurals.. I just did.

Hmmm.. just out of curiosity, I tried rendering a Darktree (http://www.darksim.com) with Mental Ray, and it crashed... This will require more research...

MR will not be able to render darktree shaders. Darktree shaders created in a standalone environment and passed on to the max scanline renderer through symbiont, which handles the translation. In order for mr to render these shaders, the mr-max bridge would need to translate them into mr shaders, which of course it doesn't, since the developer doesn't support it. mr will NOT render any sort of 3rd-party shader. Only SOME of max's procedurals are supported. You'd need to write your own mr shaders to get close to darktree. Cheers!

SM

[FortUno]

Originally posted by toonman


MR will not be able to render darktree shaders. Darktree shaders created in a standalone environment and passed on to the max scanline renderer through symbiont, which handles the translation. In order for mr to render these shaders, the mr-max bridge would need to translate them into mr shaders, which of course it doesn't, since the developer doesn't support it. mr will NOT render any sort of 3rd-party shader. Only SOME of max's procedurals are supported. You'd need to write your own mr shaders to get close to darktree. Cheers!

SM

Doh! Oh well, I guess I'll have to render the Darktree's first.. :annoyed: That sucks...

Here's some tutorials for MR:
www.3dvf.com (http://3dvf.com/tutoriaux/mentalray_max/mr_max.php3)
It's in French, so unless you speak French, you may need to run it through babelfish (http://babelfish.altavista.com).

BTW, see if you can get some results with the caustics.. No matter what settings I put in, I always get a little hard white dot instead of nice preatty spread out caustics. :annoyed:

[-wT-]

And Ed Harriss' site has been the place for many good tutorials when I first got my hands on MR for Maya.
http://www.edharriss.com and then tutorials, XSI rendering and et voila!

Enjoy!

[toonman]

Originally posted by Lord Twilight


Doh! Oh well, I guess I'll have to render the Darktree's first.. :annoyed: That sucks...

Here's some tutorials for MR:
www.3dvf.com (http://3dvf.com/tutoriaux/mentalray_max/mr_max.php3)
It's in French, so unless you speak French, you may need to run it through babelfish (http://babelfish.altavista.com).

BTW, see if you can get some results with the caustics.. No matter what settings I put in, I always get a little hard white dot instead of nice preatty spread out caustics. :annoyed:

Yeah, you'll need to render out the Darktree shaders into texturemaps, and reapply them to your objects. Of course, if you don't want to do this, you might be able to split your project into frames... and render the object's using Darktree shaders through the regular scanline (maybe with a domesphere to get some diffuse lighting), render the rest with mr, and composite everything (of course, you'll need to match luminance levels and maybe do some color correction on the scanline-rendered sequences to match mr's lighting levels).

As for the caustics thing, try playing around with the photon radius and sample range... also, you might wanna add a very light bump map to the caustic emmiting object to break up the caustic patterns (boy, how I'd like to be able to use photon shaders in these cases). Cheers!!

SM

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