Mental Ray rendering 5k and higher

#1

Hello Mental Friends,
i am about to begin on a project that will require final renders that ranges from 5-10k. i am using Mental Ray and Max 2010, i have 8gb system ram the scene will not have more that 500k polys. in theory there should be no problem, i am doing a 5k clay render right now and it is going fine so far, mental ray uses about 2.5gb so far of system ram.

so if this is going so well why the post. well i always see the glass half empty or broken, and i have been rendering with mental ray for a long enough to know know that not because it works in pre-production test means that it will be the same in production, there is always something some null or poly that just will not render. so i just wanted to know if you all had any tips about problems you had tried to render at these sizes.

Most of the Mental Ray performance settings i know how the work and stuff but in Max 2010 i cannot find the memory settings for mental Ray, the were available in 2009…

i know i will just have to try and see what happens in production, i just wanted to get a head start and things to come… a Discussion…

Thanks you for you reply…

#2

Are you rendering a few stills or an animation?
If it is just a few stills, you may be best off using backburner (even through one machine) and have it use strip rendering, where it will render your image in strips which you define the pixel height of. Once they are complete it will stitch them together.
2 things to keep in mind with this: make sure to pre-calc your FG if you are using it, and do not end the saved file name with a number.

#3

thank you for that tip, not something i thought about… it will only be single frames… i have 2 other computers that i will use in production and i was thinking about using mental ray satellite rendering… i will test it out on smaller frames to see how the GI/FG looks… but i can always use them with backburner but i am not sure about how GI/FG works when using mental ray satellite…
any comments about mental ray satellite rendering and FG/GI any known problems using thins method…

#4

I think 64bit and lots of RAM make MR happy. We’ve rendered 14K (in maya) recently whereas before moving to 64 bits machines the limit was around 3 K or 4 K.

#5

you said geometry broken or null poly, Make sure you have “Use Geoemetry” option turned off in processing tab or just clear its cache and rerender.

#6

If you use satellite rendering with mental ray, do not use BSP2. Stick with the original BSP.
When using BSP2, it will all render fine, but when it comes time to save the image, it’ll crash.

#7

I would never have guessed that BSP2 would do that, but is sure good to know because i know that BSP2 takes longer to render, but would never guessed a crash… thanks…

another question: there is going to be a lot of brushed metals and glossy ref. that will require lots of samples which =(render time * a lot more time) i started looking at the MetaSL Material Library found here:

http://materials.mentalimages.com/browse.php?id=18&page=1

has anyone worked with these before, do they render faster than A&D materials… i have not got around to doing any test yet because i am still rendering a 5k clay render of my model to get an idea of time…

so far i its on 89% and a memory usage so far max of 3.6gb of 8gb so looks good for this test its been rendering since Friday 18:00 its Sunday 11:50 (i am in Sweden) and this just a clay render with AO…

Thanks for the help…

#8

That is a huge amount of time for a clay+ao render, even at that size.
What are you FG settings? Are you also using GI? How many lights are in your scene?
Keep in mind that FG is resolution independent. You can pre-calculate the FG at half or even quarter resolution and set it to “Read Only” for the rendering itself.

I’ve never used the MetaSL shaders, so I can’t give any word there.
However, another option you have to address the blurry reflections is to do it in post.
If you keep the reflection’s glossiness to 1.0 to render quicker and create an ObjectID or MaterialID pass, you can do the blurring in P-Shop (or whatever you are using) by locking the layer’s alpha selection to keep the blur to the edges.

#9

well the my first 5k frame is done… 43h:33m:27s was the final time… i must say that that was not an optimal render… i used my production settings which was not necessary that was an oversight… but the FG was set to medium preset in max which did not take that much time 2h45m for a 5k image was not that bad… i have 3 photo Met. lights Ray T shadows, the real problem was sampling of 4 and 64 for a clay render was kinda over kill… but i used those setting just to get a time estimate… and a contrast settings of 0.01 which is what i use in production. with this render i now have a time frame… You may thinks that these settings are a bit high and you would right is some cases but i wanted to see if it would render or crash… because i know with all the metals on this object i will need a lot of samples to make it look real, doing the blur in post is a good option but the final renders will be for a catalog and some times post blurs are not the same a 3D so its a matter of what i can get away with… but thank you for the tip…

I installed a few of the MetaSL shaders but i keep getting a error in the DX shader when i try to use them and it renders grey… not sure what i am missing but i have few hours to figure it out or skip it all together…

#10

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