80's cartoon Post Mortem: Tell us what you learned...

#101

In Maya is pretty much the same, you just pick a different renderer like when you pick FPrime. In addition, with Mental Ray you can write your own shaders, most 3rd party renderers allow for this… I’m not a coder so I just thank the many code heads out there writing shaders.

MR for Maya converts the maya nodes; the scenes are translated in order to get them rendered, just like LW, the geo has to be triangulated at render time.

You can learn more here
http://www.mentalimages.com/products/mental-ray.html

I made this glass shader (I still need to upload it to mrmaterials.com) The scene provided uses Photons, and it is illuminated by a poly. I was trying to duplicate a mr material for max.

#102

Your explanations are much simpler than theirs.

That doesn’t sound so bad but there must be something about it that is difficult since that’s what I always read about it from others.

Plus from their FAQ,
“How many licenses do I need to render on a multiprocessor machine and/or on a network of machines?
One license per cpu.”

Yowza, makes me appreciate LWs 999 free render nodes.

#103

Well nowadays, obviously you would need max or maya running on the farm and thus you would also have a license of mentalray. So I suppose you have as many licenses of mentalray as your chosen 3D app. Don’t know what htey are talking about for multiproc machines…i have a 4 processor machine at work and a 2 at home and definately no license problems. I was a little intimidated by it at first, but it’s really not bad once you get into it. It’s always the same challenge of learning what their terminology means and what settings means this vs. what you learned in another app. Not bad and I love to use it for it’s excellent skin shaders and Architectural meterials (that come with some nice presets for starting points).

#104

In MR for maya you get 8 nodes with one license of Maya if I remember correctly, still not as good as LW 999 nodes but I end up rendering with RenderTitan if I need to anyway, otherwise rendering overnight has been ok.

#105

Hrm…

[b]I learned:

[/b]
[ul]
[li]that zbrush models with more than 10 or so subtools can get tedious reeeeeally fast (which translates to = Subtool Master is very helpful sometimes).[/li][li]that modeling and sculpting bandages is a giant pain in the ass![/li][li]that if you have a model with lots of subtools, it’s probably a good idea to try and break each and every one of them before sinking time into a sculpt that you may have to throw away later.[/li][li]to consider the prominence of a character on a turntable. The turntable is supposed to display the character, and probably shouldn’t compete with it unless it’s part of the design.[/li][li]taking into consideration the previous lesson, one shouldn’t waste hours of work on a turntable you won’t use. Especially when there is more you could do to your character. :P[/li][li]it’s a bad idea to create geometry in zbrush and then reconstruct it, when a simplified mesh could be generated in maya/max in about 15 seconds.[/li][li]that mentalray doesn’t seem to like lighting double-sided objects that have no depth.[/li][li]not to overdo texture resolution unless you have a machine that can handle it.[/li][li]to count teeth.[/li][li]how to sculpt and paint ROTTING FLESH! Yeaaaaaaaaah! And maggots?[/li][/ul][b]
My next focuses in learning are:

[/b]
[ul]
[li]about mentalray. I run into issues too frequently, so there are obviously gaps in my knowledge.[/li][li]about hard surfaces in zbrush. I see so many great hard surface models built, sculpted, and rendered entirely in zbrush. The how of that just eludes me.[/li][li]about a better way to meet up subtools for organic models. For this particular model it wasn’t so important because there were things hiding the seams; but I won’t always have that luxury. I’ve seen some multi-subtool organic models that seem to meet up perfectly, and I want to know more about how they do it. And I don’t mean just the polys meeting. They light as if it’s one mesh as well. I’m stumped.[/li][/ul]

#106

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