Timothy Saunders

Anyone know if Viz 2008 has the new features of mental ray (sun and environment, presets and stuff)?

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Ray

This is from the 'What's New' in Viz2008 Help:

• mental ray 3.5 software adds powerful rendering functionality to Autodesk VIZ 2008. Features include:
  • Create photorealistic sunlight, skylight, and skies with visible sun with the Sun & Sky solution.
  • The new mental ray Arch & Design material improves the image quality of architectural renderings and improves workflow and performance in general and make it easier for designers and architects to create effects such as rounded corners, blurred reflections, frosted glass, and glossy surfaces such as floors.
  • The new mental ray Car Paint material is ideal for re-creating the unique new-car look and feel, with four layers for pigment, metal flakes, clear coat, and, if the car's been on the road a bit, dirt. The same features are also available in the Car Paint shader.
  • Global illumination in mental ray is now far more accessible with final gather presets and easier-to-use controls.
• When rendering very large images from the command line you can now specify how images are to be split and stitched. See Command-Line Rendering Switches.

Timothy Saunders

Hmm. I may have to go ahead and install it. I'm close to jumping ship on Vray.

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Justin Hunt

Jump in the waters great

Why the jump?

JHV

ralopez

Why the Jump Tim?

Ray

Yeah, why?

Timothy Saunders

Well, I guess I shouldn't be that drastic. But I will deffinately dangle my feet a little. I am just SOOO tired of fighting the memory issues with vray lately. Ya it renders super quality, with lightning speed, and great material options at low resolution. But every scene we do that has a lot of different materials, furniture, different lighting fixtures, etc. has memory issues when it's time to render a 3000px image. I just miss the days when I first started using Vray wihout getting errors. Who knows maybe I just need to uninstall it and go back to an older version. It just seems a shame to leave all those cool new materials behind if I did backstep. I guess that's what I would be doing by switching to Mray, but it's worth exploring when it's free and all.

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Justin Hunt

Oh I wouldn't say it's a back step.

The Arch&Design material is as good if not better than the Vray materials. Besides there are also a heap of other shaders available that will give unbelievable control over your renderings. IF thats what you are after.

Sure it would be great to have the proxie objects of Vray but I must say that that is possibly the only feature that I miss. Mray3.5 is a huge improvment over past versions and is very quick.

The Final Gather is very good, so much so that I havnt needed to touch photons since.

The sun and sky system is fantastic. What I also like with the mr Physical Sky shader is that it isn't limited to the environment slot and in itself whilst very simple and straight forward to use it is very powerful.

The Mentalray community has taken a leaf out of Vrays community book and is becoming more and more open, have you taken a look at the mymentalray.com , Masterzaps blog mentalraytips.blogspot.com and not to forget Jeff Pattons blog http://jeffpatton.cgsociety.org/blog/ a wealth of information

JHV

Ray

Keep us posted on how it goes.

Timothy Saunders

I'll let you know. It may be a month or two before I produce anything. Who knows what will be shown at Siggraph/DVC this year from either renderers.

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