To MegaTK or to not

[crispy4004]

Puppet's shaders are good, the hair shader in particular. That said, I prefer taking the Mia_Material_X_Passes approach instead of using MegaTK. It allows me to get the results I want with the freedom to create unlimited extra frame buffers as I deem necessary. Also I'm a control freak and like having complete control over the whole Pass building process, that way I know the results I get will work with my compositing workflow.

For teaching students, it would probably be better for them to learn how to create the passes necessary without any extra plugins. There's no guarantee that they'll work in a studio that has adopted MegaTK.

As you have no doubt discovered, Maya's Pass Presets can give broken, unusable passes, but you can get around those limitations through some Mental Ray trickery.
Check This Thread for Learning Materials on the Subject. (http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=87&t=797955)

[mercuito]

Hey Ollie!

Been a long time! Mega_tk is a pretty solid system, but I can't say its really very user friendly or very well integrated - but bug free as far as I've seen. Whatever you do, steer clear of the built in pass system. I decided to throw it into production for a short we did - bad mistake. It caused me so much headache that its not funny.

So I gave up on that, then decided it was time to do my own thing, cause this kind of thing doesn't need to be so complicated in Maya.

Check this out -
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=7&t=803178


All the best, hope things are going well for you.

Corey

[revilo3D]

Hey Corey!

Yeah long time indeed! Fantastic development there man... really nice stuff. Curious about how the built in render system pass burnt you - its what I also heard from Emil, hence the puppet usage. Having come back into such a role running and not having directly been connected with the most recent developments in these areas (thanks to dumbed down game pipelines and requirements), I need to this kind of insight ;)

PS. I thought you guys ran Renderman there anyway :P
PSS. Any chance of a pre release tryout of your dev. hehe

crispy4004
Thanks for you input man. I will definitely be looking into showing them the underlying creation and concept behind the passes. The course is heavily geared towards real world production and adopting different pipelines - so to try and do production and not seeking out 3rd party developments or even creating their own (like Corey has) is not really the approach or mentality I'm looking to give them. I will show the Maya system regardless, however its exactly the experience that Corey mentioned that I wish to avoid when they put their production into action and would like the have a robust workflow for them to use, or revert to should things get problematic :)

Thanks guys,

Exactly the feedback I was after!:applause:

[mercuito]

Its not just 1 or 2 things wrong with the built in system, if that were the case, I could probably work around it, its a lot of stuff scattered everywhere, to name a few off the top of my head:
- Occlusion pass, no max distance control, or anyway to exclude objects from occlusion. The max distance is set to the size of your scene, which makes it unusable on large scenes, you have to set up a custom occlusion pass and attach a write to buffer node to every single shader in your scene, and the connections tend to break with referencing.
- Custom passes can be slow for no apparent reason, a lot of other people have reported this issue too.
- If you use a transparency mapped object with soft raytrace shadows, all the passes get kind of corrupted with bits of shadow in every pass, happens all the time in linux, and only sometimes on windows, have sent that bug to AD.
- Contribution maps dont work on certain passes.
- Refractions are corrupted in some passes.
- Support for mental ray materials is only half done.
- And theres so much work involved to set things up unless you script it.
- And a bunch of other stuff i cant remember.

Nah we're still running mental ray here, has treated us pretty well and my new system will be bending it to suit us perfectly for a long time to come. So where are you working these days? Whats Emil up to?

PS, can promise any kind of tryout... but flick me a email so I have your address and if things progress towards a release, you'll be the first to get a beta copy.

[Puppet|]

Regaring p_MegaTK...

Some advantages of p_MegaTK usage:
1. It's open source solution. You may edit code as you want or recompile for your software if you need it. I don't recommend to use 3rd party solution without source code (or good support) in production.
2. Some users likes p_MegaTK and p_HairTK shaders it self without passes. It have a lot of control. And so it's not only passes system.
3. p_MegaTK have correct shadow pass that will have no problem with compositing (like grey contour between shadow and diffuse). Beauty pass in most cases is more similar to composition result.
4. OpenEXR is scanline. It works better with compositing software. Also you have a lot of compression and format controls. But in current version it's only multichannel.

Some disadvantage of p_MegaTK:
1. If you need correct passes you are limited to TK lights. But most production write it own lights and shaders.
2. You are limited p_MegaTK or p_HairTK shader. You should try it. How these shaders may replace all other shaders. But p_MegaTK is pretty universal.
3. You are limited fixed build-in passes. But you have 10 custom channels (it may be slower).
4. crispy4004 is right. It's plugin and so there's no guarantee that MegaTK will be used in some another studio that you may get new job or will work with.

May be something else...

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