Mental Ray has lost it

#1

Hey All,

I'm still adjusting to Maya 2016's render settings so naturally I may be missing something, but is anyone else experiencing instances where your renders come out noticeably different without changing your settings?  Sometimes I feel I open my maya project and the renders look exactly as intended, but let's say I reopen maya due to a freeze, crash, etc...  other times I am experiencing my render looking quite different.

for example, i’ve got a self-illuminating material with the geo hidden so i can ‘fake’ a light reflection on a surface. Ideally i get a nice gentle glow on my surface, but now (again, without touching my render settings) my gentle glow has turned into a blown out beam. Any ideas?

FYI this is a mia material with a mia light surface plugged into the additional color, intensity of .3 and FG contribution of .280 One final gather light bounce.

#2

thread title is a little dramatic

if you read the release notes about mental ray for maya 2016 they’ve enabled a lot of things by default. Things like the bidirectional path tracing now defaults to on which might really change the look of lights and reflections in some scenes.

It’s always driven me nuts too when first moving a file from an earlier version of maya to a newer version because some things like the bsp setting will automatically reset to bsp2 when the scene was set specifically to regular bsp. You have to set things back then save as the scene as the new maya version format for the settings to stick.

#3

Thank you for the direction.
I’ll take a look at the settings once again. I agree that reading all the literature before working is helpful, but not always practical in divining and avoiding all potential issues. I appreciate the response and will try once again. Still, the issue is one of having worked on the scene in Maya and reopening it in the very same version and getting different render results. It’s lucky they provide legacy settings with these upgrades otherwise I’d be much, much more confused.

#4

Hi, i’m also looking at maya 2016 right now and one thing i noticed is that the color management of the render view keeps changing all the time. (exposure,gama and color profile)

Maybe it is just that?