Other 3d app user question on Maya rendering

[alexx]

i only know lightwaves renderer from version 5.0.. but it really rocked (and in that days the features were really a few) - but very good quality.

max has indeed a huge bunch of external (and seeing e.g. final render) very cheap and great renderers.

maya.. naja..
the internal renderer can be used but has quite a lot of flaws. i use that one since some years and you can get along with it, if you know what you are doing. but for sure: it could be way better.

concerning mental for maya: the implementation gone quite far but lacks some features and a lot stability still. and note: it is only free for one maya license. if you want to render with it on a renderfarm, you have to buy it per machine.
the usage itself is really simple, as long as you dont want to use any mental ray custom shading nodes.. if not, you just create your shaders like you were used to before with the maya renderer and go.
when using custom shaders, you will see, that the mental ray manuals really really suck.

but the beginning is promising.. lets see and wait what the next version will bring..

cheers

alexx

[IMarshal]

Thank you for the reply Alexx. Was hoping to get a few more comments from other Maya users, perhaps they will provide some (hint hint hint).

[martu]

I love the native Maya renderer and I´m familiar with Lightwave, Cinema, Max and Mental Ray as well ...
It took some time to get used to it, but it´s worth the affort! You can achieve brilliant images with short rendertimes ... just some tweaking ...
I´m cheating globalillum in most apps, even when native global illumination is provided ... it´s very CPU expensive in most cases. The true natural phenomena renderer is Mental Ray ... very effective photon calculations, true lens effects and if you combine the MR for Maya version with some standalones you get true distributed rendering including precalculations! (the only lack is bad handling of huge poly constructions - MR is true NURBS renderer, but also SubDs are working fine ...)

Cheers

[alexx]

you can live with the maya renderer, but i had in in production for even mid scale projects (sci fi pilot series with 350 fx shots) and the 2 things we stumbled across over and over again:

- poor edge anti aliasing even with highest settings (which got a bit better with the higher maya versions)

- very unpredictable and unreliable results in rendering, meaning stability (maya crashes and tells you all is fine..)

besides those two as i mentioned, i am working with the maya native renderer only since about 4 1/2 years.. so it can not be THAT bad for sure ;)

cheers

alexx

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