Maya 8.5 Sun/Sky Rendering Bad

#1

I do alot of Architectual rendering. I’ve been waiting for Sun/SKy with mental ray, and finaly it has come out. But it render just like the old mental ray, fades materials, reflection washes out, textures washed out… I’ve been using mental ray for a long time and been testing maya 8.5 mental ray, and so far the lighting in mental ray is horrible… I tryed my hardest to recreate the quality and lighting i get from other renders such as Finalrender stage-2, i can’t come close after hours of trying and Finalrender stage-2 takes about 2 minutes to set up… Is their something seriously wrong I’ve been missing all the while?

#2

Not got much what you mean. I have played with the ported version of Phyiscal Sky of yahsu and must say it s great. So, the new one in 8.5 is not as good as the Max version ??? A picture will help much

#3

Well, I like FR stage 2 too but right now it’s a buggy mess. Mental Ray is nice and I haven’t found it to do any of the things you’re talking about unless I screwed something up (which happens alot). =)

I wouldn’t blame Mental Ray. By washed out, what do you mean? I don’t mean to sound rude here so don’t get upset, but are you sure it’s not just a bad lighting set up?

#4

I did have a quick look on the new sky/sun simulator. A few observations:

  • there is no setup for latitude, time etc. like in the ported version (can be solved with the bonus tools but has to be done manually.
  • the color of the sky and sun doesn’t change according to the time (I connected the sun direction node from the bonus tools to solve the previous point)
  • I have the idea that I miss a bunch of settings but this I need to verify.

Looks like they ported only half of the sun/sky system

#5

Can you be a bit more specific ? I have great results with the system, and als before with Mental Ray. Maybe you can post an image ?

Edit: sorry a bit to quick. I did not see you meant maya 8.5

#6

I will setup 8.5 tomorrow. But seem a terrible thing Autodesk bring us again :scream:
So, why dont we overwrite it with the great thing that Yashu has done :thumbsup:

#7

I’m gonna do two renders one with Finalrender stage-2 and One with mentalray in version 8.5 so I can show you how horrible mr lighting and rendering looks.

what should i use to show the images for this thread?

#8

make sure you fix your MR lighting so at least the comparison will be fair.

#9

I’m gonna do my best to adjust mr lighting and am gonna render high quality with mr, and use just defualt settings with Finalrender stage-2… It will be more than fair for Mentalray. But how do I Post an image?

#10

since you’re on maya 8.5, use these settings for fg:
fg accuracy (rays): 50
points density: 0.1
fg points: 30-40

it returns amaising smooth and detailed results in no time! :smiley:
its sooo soo much better than that old fg heh, but!
you wont be able to render old scenes with FG properly,
you’ll get very ugly artifacts if you do so. and neither
export/import obj doesnt seem to work lol :surprised
so build new scenes from scratch for now, till
a solution comes out hh :smiley:

#11

Here is the image top high quality highly tweeked Mentalray. Bottom low quality FR2

http://img263.imageshack.us/my.php?image=highqualitymrnd2.jpg

http://img263.imageshack.us/my.php?image=lowqualityfr2ud5.jpg

#12

hmmm…the Problem wont be solved by changing render settings of MR. The sampling is not the problem.

When using physical sky and sun…maya attachs mia_exposure_simple node to your camera.

This is a tone mapping lens shader for the camera…with this you can tweak the gamma of your renders…this should fix the washed out affect of the render…look in the help files to understand why this node is there in the first place.

tweak the gain attribute of the exposure node.

What it is doing is brightening the darker tones…by default it is at .2 if you lower it to .1 you get very saturated colors again.

#13

I have used the tone map, that is one i tweeked to get a good render, that is part of the many tweeks i made for the pic i posted.

#14

hmmm…i just took a red sphere…a blinn, dgs, and mia_material…and added a default sky and sun…and got a washed out red.

I dropped the gain from .2 to .1 and left the rest at default…and got much richer colors.

#15

yea but make a whole scene, what happends is when you adjust everything to render the reflective balls nice, now the lambert material objects are to dark or to dark shadows, it’s hard to get it even, you render in fr2 or other renders everything renders out perfect together

#16

jumping between different render engines doesnt work…you have to tweak the shaders to fit a particular render engine.

Even going between maya and MR doesnt work.

#17

I’ve tweeked and tweeked, but compared to other renders maxwell, v-ray, finalrender, no matter how much i tweek and tweek, it still comes out horrible compared to those. And i don’t even need to tweek those much, maybe 2 minute tweeking…

#18

and what kind of renders do you get without using physical sky?

#19

If it is any conselation I am having the same problem, can’t work it out. I am going to contact autodesk and see what they have to say. If I get anything I’ll let you know.

A fellow FR user!! Glad to see I am not alone.

Cheers

Neil

#20

pretty much the same rendering, I pretty much duplicated in the past what physical sky does for you now, but thats the best i would get… I still can’t get nice lighting and rendering of all materials and models through a scene…