arrghhh! too many explanations!..too many words an disussion for mental ray sun and sky,
i mean, ok its good get help but… all tis post makes me afariod about maya 8.5 and mental ray,
finally MAXWELL RENDER RULZ with a few settings, just click and go!, no waste of time setting and setting for hours to get a “so so” render!
Maxwell rulz!
Yes, Maxwell rules, why do you complaint against Mental Ray?, just render with Maxwell, It´s all you have to do.
MCYORIAN is kinda right, it’s great to get all this info, but i think for the people here who want to learn or don’t know much about mental ray are getting scared out of using it because of all the technical information and all these setups it takes to do something that you can do with other renderers in one click. I tryed all of these different ways that alot of you explained on here, each one had it’s problem though, and the main problem is their isn’t one setting to fix a whole scene, if you change gamma in one area it doesn’t work for another. I think what we need and what we all are looking for, if it exists is a simple method of setting something that will fix the gamma for the entire render and everything in it. I think what everyone wants is a simple step by step of how to do that. And thank you to everyone that has helped in this thread and to the person that can figure this out and let us know.
I think what we need and what we all are looking for, if it exists is a simple method of setting something that will fix the gamma for the entire render and everything in it. I think what everyone wants is a simple step by step of how to do that.
Remember that this is a limitation of the implementation in the 3D package not Mental Ray.
There will come a day (and I’m fighting for it) where color swatches in applications are properly gamma-adjusted. Some applications can, others not, and sometimes it’s not completely consistent. Some day… alas… I dream… 
What to do?
Well, basically, you will have to “unconvert” the Swatch. Myself (personally) have begun to do this “in my head”, I don’t see color swatches as any “direct” representation of the final color, more a principial display of the reflectance, so to me, paradoxically, your image looks fine 
Also, keep in mind that you are getting colored light and reflections from the sun&sky, so you can never actually match exactly the color, unelss you turn off the sun/sky saturation completely… I mean, an object under a blueish/yellowish lightmix does look different than something under precicely white light.
A rule-of-thumb could be to “square” your color values, if you want to do it “by hand”.
If your color is 1, 0.8, 0.5, set it to
1 * 1 = 1
0.8 * 0.8 = 0.64
0.5 * 0.5 = 0.25
It’s an “approximation” (using a gamma of 2) but it can be a useful rule-of-thumb.
/Z
I own 2 licenses of maxwell, and recently bought 4 licenses of final render for maya, I also own 4 licenses of Air (renderman) run through mayaman
I have not used mental ray for a long time, it was simply too slow, the translator was unreliable in large scenes, and it just never worked for me for interior stuff with GI. Also it was very complicated and time consuming to set up.
Well I just got maya 8.5 and I have switched all my current projects to mental ray (except for a couple of GI based archi interiors)
I am really impressed with the sky shader, its the closest to maxwell (the benchmark!) I have seen, its fast, and nothing raytraces glass and metalics like mental ray.
I am seriously impressed, Master Zap, you have done very well, and helped bring me back over to a renderer I had written off!
cheers, Nick
Fingers crossed its not to far off in the future 
Thanks MasterZap, I will give that ago, if its simple as doing a bit of math I’m fine with that.
their is no way to set the Gamma under Framebuffer to get it to work with the whole render and not just textures?
their is no way to set the Gamma under Framebuffer to get it to work with the whole render and not just textures?
Oh man you reminde me of Holmes on Homes … that is so true / funny
If you don’t know what I’m talking about then…
you need to watch his show
http://www.holmesonhomes.com/mike_holmes.php
Back to the subject
That’s way Master Zap has the word “master” in his title
even though I was lost halfway of his explanation but it’s great thread
:bowdown:
I also do a lot of architectural renderings and have the same problems with washed out reflections. If i do full specular dgs I get good results, but I don’t really do that many chrome rims. Working with using tone maps to reduce the general washed out look, but my HDRI reflections in glasses are a pain to get good looking. It is either mirror and good reflections og transparent and crappy reflections. Do people render reflections in a seperate pass and comp it in or is there a trick? (This is using most mi materials, but most recently mia_architectural).
i feel your pain Olegr, i tryed everything and every tweek and setting people have told me, to date nothing has worked, and if you get one thing to work something else in your scene doesn’t work with that setting… if I was you I would really try Finalrender, it is awsome for architectual rendering, but lacks support for certain things in maya that MR does support…
Generally, this means your hdri intensity is simply too low, or too low contrast.
The thing with physically correct rendering is that your scene should have a huge dynamic range, and the tone mappers job is to “squeeze” that huge range down to a viewable range.
The “classic” error is to make the scene “low dynamics” and when tone-mapping it, it looked flat and dull.
/Z
I spend a little time to say a couple of things. Here at cgtalk, and even out of there, we can see that with mental ray we can do thing similar to other render, so, it’s possible (if I’m not wrong it won many awards…). It’s true, it’s difficul, but I like it for this reason! I don’t want a magic button… why? In this case I don’t know what the program is doing!
I want to know how my render work, if I tweak something I want to know what the result is!! It’s a huge trials and error, I must admit it… sometimes I crash my head on the wall, but if I look back when I started I’ve made huge progresses. Reading here, trying myself and even doing something that I tough was wrong and discovering that it was the right way… Reading posts, one, two, one hundred times… I love how mental ray work, and I love mental ray (well, it’s a “love & hate” relationship to say the true =). I’m not as good as I want to be, but everyday I try to improve my skills. It’s not the program fault, it’s me, and I know it! So, another time, thank you to Master Zap and the other people for the work they do! Everytime something new is released I feel like a kid on christmass because I know there is something to learn! 
And now a little question for Master Zap. Waht do you mean with “huge dynamic range”? :shrug:
Ciaciaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
(sorry for my english =)
well with maxwell render i ALWAYS know too what the render is doing! (and i dont wanna talk abou i cant make changes on the render process on the fly!..Changes in Real Time While Processing!)
i i dont need multiples “magic” and “confused” butons and settings to say “oh! im the super-pro- man!” , i love the simply.
just like a mac, or an ipod, or the nintendo wii control, or the new mobile phones, or the MAXWELL RENDER, or the most of things on this world that learn that the secret of succes is on simplicity!
JESUS SAID!..the most important things are simply.
(sorry for my english)
I think you are right, I’m not much for Mental ray after all this. But i must say, maxwell takes longer to render than it takes to do all the unbearable setups, tweeks, and renders in mental ray.
You can hardly blame Mental Ray for that, blame the software that interfaces with it…
For example take a look at ImageStudio its a neat little renderer made by Alias its is Maya but with a rehased interface…
Its designed for product rendering but the neat thing is all the shaders and enviroments are prebuilt as are the render settings…
You just drag and drop materials and hit render and presto! a nice picture…
What does it use for a rendering, you got it Mental Ray.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=6860843
So there you go 1 button solution which is fast built on mental ray that produce nice results…
It only really works well with products but thats is what it is designed to do.
This is what it all comes down to. Some people need the simplicity and photographic quality of Maxwell Render, while some people need the flexibility and animation power of mental ray. Both do their jobs well. We can want Maxwell to be faster and want mental ray to be easier and that’s fine. It’ll just take time in both cases.
