FG vs GI VS Caustics

# 1 03-03-2004 , 01:48 AM

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Location: Sioux Falls, SD

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Okay, tell me something. I want great renderings in a fairly quick amount of time. I'm patient but I do have my limits. I've been experimenting with all the above (FG/GI/Caustics) with the Mental Ray renderer with no area lights and we'll see how bad it looks. Can anyone here set me straight with advice or tips or help on how to use Caustics or GI in Mental Ray? FG seems to just slog my computer down to a deathly crawl. THANKS!!! user added image

Russell

Russell Bolding
CEO/Founder - Russelltopia Studios
Web:https://www.russelltopia.com
Email:russbo@russelltopia.com

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# 2 03-03-2004 , 05:41 AM

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There is far to much to cover in just one thread. But creating very simple scene's and playing with the settings one buy one and thin together can be very helpful. MR is a very tweak centric program. Its geared to give you full control of the time / quality. So its best to make test renders, start out with very low numbers and increase until it does not look like poo.

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# 3 08-03-2004 , 08:20 PM

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I've started to do a few renderings with MR and it looks kinda okay. Render times aren't super fast but they are faster than they used to be. Last night, Maya would crash on me every time I tried to render with MR so I had to reinstall Maya to get things working again. My renders with just FG make the image look yellow-ish. When I activate GI (no caustics), I see blotches all over the image. Low photon counts - ya think, maybe? What kinds of settings do you all use usually? Anybody got any pointers for moi? Thanks in advance. BTW, I'd show you all what my reenders look like but right now, I'm on my wife's PC that has the Internet connection and mine has no connection yet. Sorry...

Russell

Russell Bolding
CEO/Founder - Russelltopia Studios
Web:https://www.russelltopia.com
Email:russbo@russelltopia.com

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# 4 12-03-2004 , 05:09 AM

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the FG just buy its self, would be make sure you have use defalt light off on the front tabe of the render globals. Also, it gets its basise off of the enviment color on the cam your rendering from. So make sure thats a gray value, probably about nutral gray will get you some nice renders from FG. I would set the FG to 200 to start with and increse that up if needed or you get splocthys.

I don't normaly use GI, so I'm not much help there. But yeah low photon counts probably.

Some pic's of the problems your having might be a help yeah.

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# 5 23-03-2004 , 02:55 PM

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heres a good tutorial that will explain the sttings and their impact on render times

https://www.3dluvr.com/intercepto/may...troduction.htm

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# 6 23-03-2004 , 07:38 PM

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Haha, I felt the same way about using Mental ray but the thing you have to remember is how long it took you to render with the standard render correctly for the first time and now multiply the control and options by 1000, decrease the stability by 200% and if you can get it to work the quality will increase exponentially. You will be play with it for a while. I suck at it still but I am learning how to make new mistakes.

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