My guess would be that you need to update your drivers, 192(or was it 193?) was the last nvidia driver that I used with iray. Its beta type software, so your are bound to have issues. Hope you can get it figured out.
As to OpenCL, I am confidant that just about everything will move to OpenCL eventually. Thats probably a long ways out. Every developer I have talked to said that CUDA is a pain to develop for and OpenCL is horrible, almost unusable. Hopefully the folks at kronos, or whoever is managing that project, get their act together soon so we can get more OpenCL software out there. For now CUDA is a much more mature API, that is evident in how much software is being released for CUDA and how little is being released for OpenCL. I think that will change, and the sooner the better. But don’t get mad at the developers for using CUDA, get mad at the folks putting together OpenCL.
Thanks for this useful post. I’m using an IBL testing iray. I was just playing around and I noticed changing the ‘environment lighting scale’ string has the the same effect as adjusting the color gain for the IBL node (using maya here). Are there any differences between adjusting these two variables?
Also should you multiply direct lights and indirect lighting( IBL) by 3.14 when using iray ? I understand the reasoning behind multiplying your lighting by pi when using iray, but theres one thing I don’t understand this magical multiplication of ‘3180’. I’m saying this after seeing your lighting scale of 0.318.
Off the topic of iray, I see this multiplication of 3180 used alot with creating HDR scene lighting. For example djx’s sun&sky script automatically multiplies the rgb scale of the physical sky by 3180 taking it from the default rgb scale of 0.0001 to 0.318. There was also a thread a while ago where people were testing the physical correctness of lights in maya, and they found that multiplying the intensity of lights by this number ‘3180’ gave the most physically correct result.
I have since been using this as a base for creating HDR scenes, multiplying my lighting by this number and leaving my cm2 factor in my exposure photographic shader set to ‘1’. I have never quite understood the reasoning behind this. Would greatly appreciate it if you could explain this for me.
I am getting back into iray testing and trying to render some old interior scenes we did just with final gather.
One of my issues is with textures.
Before all textures had maya gamma correct nodes flugged into them to linearise them. However these nodes do not appear compatible with iray.
Can I ask how others have rendered their textures for linear workflow? Have you just coverted them to linear in photoshop/nuke first or are you able to get a gamma correct node/mip_gamma_gain node to work with iray?
If using Maya 2011 you can simply put Input to say sRGB, meaning that all your textures you plug in are handled as gamma corrected, which is the same as using the gammacorrect node.
Then under Output, you put it to Linear. Using a exposure_simple node on the camera is recommended with gamma set to 2.2.
The 3ds Max 2011 Subscription Package obviously comes with iRay support, and by support I mean some kind of GUI to control it all, at least thats what I heard.
but for color swatches you still have to gamma correct them right? for mia material, etc … I dont think the color management take into account color swatches … I might be wrong, correct me if I am…
Also do you still need to add the mia exposure simple even when you use the color management?
what I do when Im in the render view I go to Display > Color Management then
Image Color Profile > Linear
Display Color Profile > sRGB
Im wondering if with this setup you still need the mia exposure …
thx.
Seems much improved over all. I haven’t pushed it too hard but it seems they have made noticeable improvements to iray.
Here is how I got it working,
Copy the required dlls from another package that has iray with mental ray 3.9 (max 2012 in my case). Put them in the your maya2012\bin folder.
cudart64_32_7.dll
libiray.dll
libiraymr.dll
Now iray is installed, to activate it I use a slightly modified k_progressiveRendering script written by Sylvain Berger. I attached my version if his script.
The script that I attached before gives you control over iray with a cute window. It makes iray a check box, there is also min samples, max samples, max time, and error threshold in there too.
hi , if i active the irradiance particles and i have a crash , i just active in render render settings-options-diagnose bsp- size, i have the bsp2 and the version 64 bits for maya 2011
You don’t need an indirect lighting method with iRay. It is a path tracer and does that automatically on its own. Turn off FG, GI, IP, etc. It’s unnecessary.
too bad there’s no demo of mental ray standalone so I could try this out on OS X. Would have been nice to use as a benchmark for the Quadro 4000 review I’m just finishing up.
Hey cgbeige, please link us to the quadro 4000 review when it’s done, I’m interested to read what another cg guy has to say about it, I actually own one.
Well i’m pretty much done with my assessment (I’m reviewing the Mac edition). It’s a huge improvement over the 4800 and the drivers, while still shitty for viewport 1 compared to the Windows drivers, are very good with vp2. It got the same score as the radeon 5870 for a large scene play blast and the msaa doesn’t cause a big hit. There are some bugs and opencl is still AWOL but that’s coming. I like it for sure - two of them with VrayRT would be cheaper than a 5000 and has more cores and it’s great that they didn’t go apeshit with a Mac-specific card (it has a little sticker on it saying Mac version) so the price is the same as the Windows version, which has always been an issue with Mac cards until now. I just hope we don’t have to wait for 10.7 for opencl support (the betas have this but the viewport is unusable in Maya with the 10.7 betas). New GL 3.2 implementation so that’s to be expected.
But I’ll put the link yo the full review in my sig later.
I was testing iray with a work colleague a few weeks ago on maya 2011. Yeah we also experienced those same issues. I guess it stems from iray not being propperly intergrated to maya yet ?
I would like to know if the same crashes happen on 2012.
