Maya 2012 Iray IPR

#21

Did you plug a physical_light into the light shader slot of the Area light?

Edit: Oops… Looks like I misread your post and thought you were talking about area lights… Brainfart. Looks like Bitter gave you a good answer though.

#22

I’ve not tried the portal light. In theory it becomes unnecessary for a path tracer. However, iRay is not currently a bi-directional path tracer so interiors lit indirectly through small openings will be more difficult to light.

iRay converts your materials to a BSDF version of the mia_material (one also exists for mental ray rendering.) This simplifies your setup. But I do not know off-hand the cause of the different renders with the sphere on a plane.

#23

@Bitter: Thanks much for the help. Since you said iray is converting my mia_material into a bsdf shader behind the scenes, I decided to try iray with one of the bsdf shaders directly. I learned how to do that from your extremely informative thread over on the mental images forum by the way. Best info I’ve seen on how to actually use those shaders. Turns out it works perfectly with the bsdf shaders! Now that’s pretty cool, but every time i try and use iray with the mia_material_x shader, I get a totally black image except for the reflection of my light source. I’ve tried both the mia_physical sun and sky set up as well as a regular old area light with some high values. Have you ever had any issues with iray translating the mia_material? Because it kind of seems like that is my problem. I made sure to uncheck ‘multiple outputs’ since it was recommended on the mental images site. I also went into the shading group and turned on suppress all maya shaders and turned off export shading group since that was recommended as well. Those are the only things I can think of that might cause me problems based on the limited info i have on this subject. Any more ideas would be awesome!

Thanks,

Justin

#24

That’s interesting, I actually wasn’t sure it would translate the BSDF shaders.

For the mia_x did you remember to uncheck “multiple outputs”? (Edit: duh you said yes.)

Replace it with the mia_material (legacy, the old one)

#25

There are a few helpful iRay additions that may help you render more quickly in Maya.

The one that may be of most use (you still get an accurate production render at some bias) is the Firefly filter.

In the miDefaultOptions:

String: iray firefly filter
Value: on
Type: boolean

Attached is a very simple example of the filter on and off. The effect is subtle and may eliminate desired caustics, but in some cases that effect is subtle and you might be able to live without. (using mia_x, dunno why it fails for Redsand) 500 passes for both images.

#26

Thanks a lot Justin :slight_smile:

#27

It seems there may be a good reason why iray is unsupported inside maya. Iray is working predictably for me now, but it has been a bit of an adventure to get there. So initially iray would render anything with my mia_material_x as totally black minus the reflection of the light source or a reflection from the environment. It did not matter if i had multiple outputs checked or unchecked, ditto for the settings in the shading group. Then I applied the bsdf lambert shader and magically iray worked. I got an error in the output window when i tried the bsdf architectural saying it was unsupported in iray and a default grey shader would be used instead…or something like that. But at least iray worked. Then i decided to try the mia_material_x again, so assigned that shader to my objects from the hypershade and broke the connections from the bsdf shader. It appeared that some magical gnomes ran around and made some secret connections because all of a sudden my mia_material_x was working! I did a few renders changing some glossines and reflectivity setting in the mia to make sure those showed up predictably in the render, they did. Then i started a new scene and tried all over again with the mia_material_x. This time the mia_material_x worked perfectly the first time. It did not matter if I had multiple outputs checked or unchecked, it still worked. So then I restarted Maya just in case some crazy connections happened behind the scenes and they were persisting from scene to scene inside the same maya session. I created the same scene from scratch, applied the mia, and it worked again. I tried checking and unchecking multiple outputs and the 2 flags in the shading group. Did not matter, still worked. So then I tried the bsdf lambert shader again. Now all of a sudden this shader rendered totally black! I tried the other bsdf shaders. All totally black as well! So then I tried the mia and it still worked perfectly.

Weird, huh? I have no clue what the magical gnomes did behind the scenes, but whatever they did for some reason iray is working now. It appears to me the magic happened when I assigned the bsdf shader for the first time. After that assignment was made, iray starting doing different things than I had seen from it before…like actually work. On Monday when I get into work I’m going to go through the same process there and see what happens because before I left on friday i was still getting black renders from iray. It will be a good test case to try this all over again and see if i can nail down exactly where the magical gnomes did their dirty work.

Thanks for all the help!

Also, thanks for the tip on the firefly string option. I’ll be giving that a try now since I can actually get a normal render now!

-Justin

#28

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