VRay-like interior renders with mental ray???

#221

Hi FuriusD,

Hey Thomas, How do you find Air

I think Air has a lot of power under the hood and I think it is probably the most interesting renderman compliant engines for the price. It allows a great deal of fine grained control and if you are willing to get into building your own shaders, the possibilities are endless.

The only downside IMHO is that the shear number of parameters in your disposal can be intimidating at first. If you can get past the learning curve, then this is one powerful engine that can hold its own relative to Brazil or Vray.

What software are you using to intregrate AIR ?

Since Rhino is my main app, I use Rhinoman as the plugin. Rhinoman is shaping up very well. It is still in beta, but it is ripe enough to use for work.

If you are a Max user I think the equivalent plugin would be: [PaxRendus](http://www.archonus.com/index.htm)
I haven't used it though so I don't how good it is.

Here are a couple of things I was able to do within a week or two of testing. (I am only scratchinjg the surface).

Here is another try at the room scene:
(Still using matte materials of vivid color to see how colorbleeding works).
[img]http://mywebpages.comcast.net/ThomasAnag/Misc/Room08.jpg[/img]

Here is one of the earliest attempts with true displacement and texturing:
[img]http://mywebpages.comcast.net/ThomasAnag/Misc/Pulley01.jpg[/img]

Here is an early experiement with glass + caustics:
[img]http://mywebpages.comcast.net/ThomasAnag/Misc/Glass_caustics01.jpg[/img]

Here is another experiment on Glass + caustics + Reflection map
(still working on this one)
[img]http://mywebpages.comcast.net/ThomasAnag/Misc/Massager04.jpg[/img]
#222

Wow some nice renders Thomas, I like the chain and the gold disc, nice materials.
Are all the parameters in the UI or are they command line ?
Does Air have preset shaders ?

#223

Are all the parameters in the UI or are they command line ?

Rhinoman is the front end. It has most of the controls needed in a graphical UI and integrates seemlessly with Air in the background.
Air is “stand alone” and it has its own UI (you can also use command line if you like), but I never use it. What happens behind the scenes is that after setting all the parameters and textures and hit the render button then Rhinoman generates a RIB file in the background (this is what Air needs to read) and automatically activates the Air render screen (called Airshow).

The beauty of it is that Rendering works independently and you can keep working on the scene as Air is working in the background on one, two or more scenes simultaneously.

Does Air have preset shaders ?

Yup, there are a lot of preset shaders. As a matter of fact, that is the only thing I use (as I do not know how create my own shaders yet; besides, creating new shaders will not be necessary unless there is a very project-specific need).

#224

20minutes to render the scene, AthlonXP 1.6…512ram, FG 180 min 0.3 max3, GI accuracy 150 radius 3, 3 lights, 2 pointlights converted into a MR area light with a square projection, and 1 spot light, all lights emitting 25000 photons :slight_smile:

#225

I tried the teapot scene with MR on XSI and here is what I got with some experimentation, it took only 5min 49sec to render on Athlon 3500+. I know it’s not exactly like the other ones but I feel it’s quite realistic, and yea - there are some artifacts - but that can be fixed with render times of 20-30min.

#226

Al-X, i think the scene needs more contact shadows, but its a nice render :slight_smile:

#227

Yea you’re right - I just noticed there was a prob with my post work, for the slight dof and such, which brightened the scene too much, here is a fixed version.

#228

Hi there! This is a GREAT thread.

I’m a XSI / LW user and I think MR is a fantastic render. But it’s practical impossible to get the same kind of GI lightning as LW/FPrime.
Using GI/FG and Ambient Occlusion MR is almost there…

Here is my 20 minutes (800x600) FPrime render.

#229

And here is a 100 minutes render with a twist… :slight_smile:

#230

nice renderings… but nothing special?!:hmm:
and this kind of light its easy with MR… just use an arealight…

#231

Hi guys!

i hav been reading ur guys forum and i thought u can help me!
i am pretty new to the cg architect world. I am still trying to find a cool way to do lighting in maya! Here is the link to our [me and A buddys] secound attempt at an architectural image!
http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/attachment.php?attachmentid=3943
Please Hav a look and tell me what u think! Please give All the crit u want!! We want to be the best!! We did the scene in maya 6, with mental ray! We used final gather and global illumination!! the scene took us 13 minutes to render!! there are still faults and we are going to fix them! Me and my buddy want to do images that rival that of people that do them with max and Vray!! So help is appreciated and links to good tuts even more!
Email me if u want a bigger format of the image!!
Email: Sheblom@Coffin-rock.com
Thanks Again!!

#232

Hi Polymess I’m also an XSI user and I have to agree with you. I find its pretty hard or even impossible to get similiar results like Maxwell and Vray out of Mental Ray.

AI-X and Polymess you guys are getting some nice results, what kind of settings are you using ?

#233

Hi FuriousD.
It’s easy. Just an area light (50%, shadow on and no falloff) turn on radiosity (100%, 1 bounce) and hit play.

Ok. Here is a scene / lightning I find hard to duplicate in MR.
It’s a simple shape, one (or two) area light, a HDRI dome and radiosity.

#234

Polymess do you mean Final Gathering ? or photons, not Radiosity ?

#235

It’s basicly just FG and GI, I’ll post detailed settings once I get something which looks better and about 20min render time, but here is the rough:

  • 1 Area light, 1’000’000 photons, shadow and umbra = 0, photon intensity about 500, and 100% intensity.
  • FG accuracy 100 or 200, don’t remember, radius is on auto-compute
  • GI accuracy is 10’000, doesn’t have that much effect though… photon size = 0.8

I’ll try to duplicated that scene polymess… see what I can get…

#236

All tree renders are with LW/FPrime.

Still tweeking the GI/FG in XSI… :shrug:
Looking forward to see your result Al-X. :thumbsup:

And once again. I DO think MR is an amazing renderer.

#237

Heres a job I did using XSI/ Mental Ray, it took me ages to get a decent look, still not happy with it.

#238

Nice work! :thumbsup:

#239

I’ve tried your last render in mental ray - I have to say it’s quite hard, FG doesn’t want to get underneath the dang shape, and probably requires very small radius to do so. Therefore I had to use a little dirtmap for this one. Here is my first try, it took about 5-6 minutes. The only thing which really bothers me are the direct shadows, they look dirty for some reason…

#240

Render time 10min