Mental Ray - Shaders

#141

How are you opening .rar files? My WinZip gives me an error for some reason. This may be a funny question for some, but I have never had to deal with this file type before.

#142

Winrar is what I use, it can be found here:
http://www.rarlab.com/

#143

Originally posted by web_weasel
[B]<<AWESOME! Thanks for the tips. I adjusted further and found that you can get by with only 35000 photons in the caustic paramaters of the spot light. By doing that and making the other changes you made, mine rendered in 6 minutes and 33 seconds.>>

Just a quick FYI, I saw mention of “upgrading to dual Xeon”, with the settings from matlock it (glass-sss.max) rendered in 4.09 minutes on a 3D Boxx dual Xeon 3.06Ghz machine (with hyperthreading enabled) with 2Ghz or Ram… Not a huge render time difference for a hefty price difference… [/B]

What was the first machine’s spec’s?

#144

First Machine specs: Dual MP1600’s, Tyan MB, 2GB DDR RAM, 7200 RPM HDD.

Edit: I didn’t list the graphics card because I didnt think it mattered that much when we are comparing rendering times (correct me if I’m wrong). None the less, it’s a radeon 9800 pro.

Edit2: I suppose this is going a bit off topic for this thread?

#145

folical9 , your comp is COOL enough but what about your graphic acceleretor?
Should be something like Nvidia Quardro FX I think?

With BIG RESPECT from Russia,
Anton.
:buttrock:

P.S.
BTW I’ve got only: p4 1.9Ghz; 1Gb; RAMBUS; Geforce2GTS; Promise 1X2 mirror SCSI 80 GB HDDs; ASUS MB;

:wavey:

#146

Hi Guys,

I just started playing around with the Transvol 2.01 shader from Andy Hayes.

It supports ambient occlusion and sub surface scattering. I’m on my laptop so I haven’t played with either or these options, just transparency and got something decent (although this is not representative of this shader’s capacity).

Here is a zip file with:

  • a simple image no SSS or AO (under 6 minutes on a 1.7ghz centrino)
  • the 3dsmax6 and maya friendly version of the .mi file

Sorry the image isn’t in the post, I just couldn’t figure out how to add it in here. (if someone can post it visibly that would be great).

You can get the shader here: tranvol201.dll

Get more info on the shader here: andymator.co.uk

On the graphics card subject, it really doesn’t matter for MR right now but at the last Siggraph some companies were using the FPU (nVidia quadro) to accelerate computation of complex things like fluid dynamics which in turn decreases render time dramatically. So the Graphics card will soon be a factor for more than playback.

#147

this would be it :)…

really nice shader
thnx for posting

#148

Please, can anyone explain to me what went wrong in my scene is it meterial or MR options? or both?

:cry:

Beforehand thanks!
Used Chamelion modfyed material:

Tryed it on my scene:

#149

maDDog[rus], can you post a sample scene so I can take a look to see whats going on?

Abbegon, have you (or anyone else), tried to enable scatter on that shader? When I did, it appeared to freeze 3ds. It said it was still running, but it shouldn’t take over 45 minutes to think about rendering a simple sphere. Maybe it’s just my PC?

#150

yeha it freezes for just a second for me… it does that for every “enable” box i enable on that shader…

strange

EDIT: erhm, just noticed that whenever i want do to anything in max now it freezes for just a second… i think i’ve to restart my comp…

and as for rendering. It’s taking ages for me too :(…
when scatter is enabled

#151

The freeze happens when 3dsmax tries to update the sample sphere in the material editor… Switch the update to manual and it should fix the freeze issue.

I talked to a pro and he mentionned that you shouldn’t turn on SSS and Ambient occlusion, only one of the 2 methods at once…

Also, I did get 2 buckets to render with SSS but gave up, took too long, haven’t figured out the “right” settings yet…

#152

hmm ok… thnx for the info

#153

I really like them.Great jobs! It’s fantastic!!:applause:

#154

if you want to post a scene ready to go I’ll run it…I have a dual opteron setup here.

thanks btw for all the mr info so far :beer:

#155

The scene is at the very bottom of page one on this thread. It’s called sss-glass. If it’s missing the two HDR files I used, they are listed in the first post of the thread.

#156

rendered in 18mins 21secs no tweaks but I did have acad running at the same time

boxx dual opteron 240
2gb ram

#157

Thanks siliconbauhaus. After reading your rendering times I became suspicious of my own time. I remember doing some research on decreasing the render times with that file. So, therefore it must have been tweaked and we are not comparing apples to apples.

Soooooo, I downloaded the sss-glass file from my server and opened it and rendered. Now, the correct render time for my machine is 21 minutes and 24 seconds. Which now sounds more inline with everyone else’s time…and really makes that dual xeon system attractive!

Thanks again guys and sorry for the confusion.

#158

And whith this shaders how can we make transparent plastic like the one in any water bottle?

#159

Some have had problems getting the IES Sun system to work with Mental Ray. I picked this tip up from the Discreet board and thought I would pass it along.

In order for the IES sun to work with Mental Ray, you need to add a light shader to it. Here’s some screen grabs to illustrate.

Add the IES Sun to your scene and enable final gather. Go to the Sun Parameters and at the bottom, in the mental ray light shader roll out, add a light infinite (base) shader to the light shader slot.
NOTE: I have not enabled shadows. You control them with the shader instead.

Then drag that shader over to the material editior as an instance. There you can tweak the shader.

I then added a skylight to the scene (medium blue in color) and then rendered:

#160

Cheers for the IES sun info folical9 that is going to be really useful for the project I am currently working on.

I was just wondering where you got that statue model from… I am sure I have seen it before.