Rendering with Maya

#35

Oh missed this one…

I never have tried Clarisse and I am not sure I ever saw it deployed at Digital Domain. Does it have a linux build?

#36

Try to learn the materials standardized by the engine. If you are using Mental Ray use the mia or mila materials. Though, I do wish it defaulted to no reflection turned on.

Mental Ray can use standard maya lights but you can really get nice realistic fall offs if you use the mental ray specific lights.

#37

I have recently made a full switch to Redshift as well, and not looking back. Even in its current form, without all the features of Vray, it is just incredible. I am able to render my scenes faster with a single 980ti than using Vray on my small farm of 5 decent machines. Not only that, but it is much cheaper than Vray, and building a set of GPUs is also cheaper.

VrayRT doesn’t even come anywhere close by comparison, primarily due to its inherent design of full reliance on the GPU, making it an entirely separate renderer from its CPU counterpart.

For sprite or streak particles or fluids I can still render them with Maya Software or MR and then comp them on top of the Redshift renders, until Redshift is able to provide full support for them. Redshift supports the particle instancer very well though, and it’s fast rendering it.

#38

just a note to the filtering talk…

The VRayLanczos filter in V-Ray is not a sharpening filter; it is similar to the area filter but with reduced moire effects.

Best regards,
Vlado

#39

You should never use maya standard materials. Okay, there is one reason, if you want to reuse your scene with another renderer. The standard materials are simple not energy conserving what means that reflections are simply added to the diffuse value of the shader what can result in a unwanted bright and shiny material. On the other hand, most renderers offer a much better control in their own shaders where you can modify e.g. the contribution to the indirect lighting or simply a matte option which lets you use the shader as a matte without assigning a complete new shader. Arnold e.g. supports maya materials only partially.

#40

I made an architecture specific forum in Renderman. and did test render there and comparing the result with Vray. I have been using vray for 7 years and when Renderman was made free to public , I had a chance to test it out.

both are capable of producing the same high quality result. though I am only familiar with Archviz, I am pretty sure both renderer are really fast. so in terms of render quality, I have no doubt Vray or renderman can do the job nicely.

it’s just… if u are working in ArchViz, then best weapon is to use Vray since there are TONS of 3D model u can buy or download are mostly available in Vray.
I like renderman so much but when it comes to downloadable asset on the net, Vray provide wayyy more availability. (see Archmodel from Volume 1 - 150 )

if you are working in ARchviz then its Vray obviously, if you are in Movie industry, then you would have to create every single asset one by one with your team, in which Renderman can save u a lot of time because the setting is simpler than Vray. (How I love Disney Shader). and btw, displacement in Renderman is super awesome.

Maxwell is extremely good too. the setting is so simple. layered material works really good and very easy to control. it has one disadvantage, super long render time. I use it in Rhino before gave up due to super long render time. its using light transit approach which simulate lights correctly as it is in real world (awesome reflection n chaustic effect. rendering Metal object is the best in Maxwell). it stores light data and u can change the light properties, its color, intensity, even turning on and off the light AFTER the rendering is done. honestly I think once the computer power is strong enough in the future, all renderer will go towards Light transit method.

I dont know much about arnold since I never use it but I heard its extremely good and capable of handling massive amount of geometry.

Thats all I can say,
happy renderinggggg

#41

Maxwell super long rendering time?That’s the first I have ever heard that.
Maybe you didn’t explore all Maxwell has to offer or your machine needs cleaning.
On the fly lighting adjustments among other things makes it very fast.
None of these match Maxwell’s materials editor making it super easy to get off and running in no time.

Having said that I downloaded the Redshift Demo and it did impress me.
Easy to use and minor adjustments didn’t get me lost like the Furry Balls Demo.
They say it’s (redshift)the fastest GPU rendering engine and they are spot on with that.
I have a 2GB GT730 on this A-6 AMD and it’s screaming right along were as the Furry was much slower and was told it’s all my cards fault.
Can’t wait to get it on my i7 machine and I may even purchase it.Glad I gave it a second look.

#42

My previous studio bought a few seats of FurryBall against me recommending Redshift. We ended up ditching it after a few test scenes.

#43

Curtis, you can’t seriously review GPU-rendering with one of the weakest cards on the market coupled with one of the lower-tier CPUs as well. Screaming right along? No, I don’t think so. You’ve got multiple bottlenecks compounding there.

Not to say Redshift isn’t the best GPU renderer currently - it totally is. And Furryball can’t be taken too seriously not just from the name, but from the support and our interactions with the devs there who are just terrible. I’m not remotely trying to be elitist about harware: my chief rig is a FX-8350 and a GTX 660, for arch/viz. But get back to us when you get that i7 running, and a new graphics card, Curtis. GT730. Come on, now.

#44

[left]You’re right.
I should’ve said for that GPU rendering compared to that CPU rendering it was screaming right along.
And compared to Furry it was doing better from the word go.
The IPRs with Redshift was really impressive.Stable.Fast.Updating with material,lighting changes.
For the old A-6/GT730 combo I thought really good.
There.Maybe I made it more clear…:surprised
[/left]

#45

Definitely vray. Arnold is good too, but vray has interpolated gi and baking options that are allowing me to render an entire short film with no frames taking more than 10min. to render, including hair w/gi and motion blur. It’s also a features-proven renderer ( Tron Legacy, Real Steel, Oblivion). If you want to render animations without a farm, there’s no better renderer; at 1hr per frame, a one-minute video would take at least two months of straight rendering. (unless you’re ready to go full-GPU rendering, but I don’t think that was your question)

#46

I just wish redshift had support for 3d procedurals

#47

I don’t think it does volumetrics yet either

What about stuff like motion blurred displacement or point caches? Does it even do render passes - and so it goes with new renderers

#48

Well, it does deformation blur, so why not displaced deformation blur? And 18 AOV’s are quite useful.
Redshift does not claim to be a full featured renderer, even mentalray has a crappy support of volumes, hair and particles. It is good in the things it does. Remember Modo, it first stated as a simple modeling tool and I thought, oh no not another modeling tool, it will never survive… :slight_smile:

#49

funny vid done with redshift…
https://vimeo.com/149000090

#50

Don’t worry, the fact that it’s not full-featured is all I’m saying, and it’s why I recommend vray instead. If you’re a hobbyist or just love to have what’s new, and don’t mind running into things you can’t do, that’s fine, but some of us don’t like that. There was a time I would have said the same thing about vray.

Same thing goes for Renderman’s new raytracer, a friend of mine is using it on a production, and he can’t get a simple shadow matte to work with an object matte, and when he contacted support about it, a pixar programmer actually asked him “what do you need that for?”. So just saying “it has 18 aov’s” doesn’t cover a whole lot.

Displaced deformation is not the same thing as keyframe deformation, it’s image - based. Rendering software is really not as simple as; if one thing works, then any similar thing will too.

#51

LOL sounds like the kind of excuse you’d get from a lazy tech artist.

#52

Yea you’d expect more professionalism from pixar - I think that’s a common little disconnect btwn programmers and end users, but I thought they were above that

#53

Ah, you are talking about an animated displacment map which creates motionblur without any geometry deformation, indeed that’s an interesting point. I suppose only very few renderers support it.

#54

Any ideas on Thea Studio?
I’m going to download the demo and I’m salivating about the cpu+gpu rendering…
…just wondering if anyone has had any luck with any of the cpu+gpu engines?