I've noticed all the EXTRA nice images seem to be rendered in another program or utility. Is the maya render not as good? What kinds of cool features do they have?

Maybe you could just point me to a few brochures or something.

thanx

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"When you are born, you have a resposiblilty to program you're own mind, if you do not accept this responsiblilty, then the world will do it for you"
Aol Instant messenger: mrcoolbp2

Maya's renderer is fine. It can just seem a bit daunting to adjust the render settings to get the kind of results you want. It does have limitations that seem to be getting fixed with each new release, though.

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-Mike
The Maya Toolbelt

mental ray 1.5 (for maya 4.5)
GI_Joe (Global illumination)

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- Simon

My Website: www.Glass-Prison.com

what is global illumination? Whats the difference between the 2? Would i notice a diff from a mental ray, renderman, or gi_joe compared to a Maya standard?Are there any free ones(payed enough for maya)?

sorry to sound like a 2 year old but thats how we learn.

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"When you are born, you have a resposiblilty to program you're own mind, if you do not accept this responsiblilty, then the world will do it for you"
Aol Instant messenger: mrcoolbp2

global illumination is a way to simulate realistic outdoor lighting, its usually very heavy on the cpu

mental ray can render proper GI, GI_Joe fakes GI because maya atm can not actually do global illumination so something is needed to give the EFFECT

mental ray is well known for its ray tracing ie. reflections, refractions, GI etc
renderman is amazing for displacement/bump maps and is so bloody fast, its pretty much industry standard (the file format it uses, which is .rib)
GI_Joe isnt actually a renderer, its just a way to simulate a light setup close to what global illumination is actually like

all those compared to mayas native:
mental ray, much faster, but cant render things like fur
renderman, very very fast, quality of image is a lot better but requires a lot of setup and you need to know how to program shaders pretty well to get a nice result
GI_Joe, nothing to compare, you cant render with it, you setup lights with it, then render using a renderer

just to clarify, from the list, the only renderers are:
MentalRay
PRman/Renderman
Maya

hope that helps

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- Simon

My Website: www.Glass-Prison.com

Wow Perfect man thanx i'm enlightened!

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"When you are born, you have a resposiblilty to program you're own mind, if you do not accept this responsiblilty, then the world will do it for you"
Aol Instant messenger: mrcoolbp2

bump on that, that helped me alot
:banana:

Are these programs like an OUTSIDE program from Maya?
like, when u need to render do u tell maya to render it and it uses that? Or you run the program separetly?
(mentalray or renderman)

thanks
Carlos.

well maya obviously renders from maya, but you can do a command line render which is from dos
GI_Joe renders from maya as its just a maya light setup
mental ray is integrated into maya so you can render from there, but you can render from outside (i think) like command line rendering
renderman can be used inside of maya but i cant really say the MTOR is all that great, better to render externally really

mayas GUI takes up ram processing power and stuff anyway which slows down the render by quite a bit which is why command line rendering is favoured cos its faster and theres no need to load a UI

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- Simon

My Website: www.Glass-Prison.com

WOW i really gotta learn how to do command line renders for my animations in my movie (in the WIP forum). Thanx again Nem, you know you're Sh*t.

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"When you are born, you have a resposiblilty to program you're own mind, if you do not accept this responsiblilty, then the world will do it for you"
Aol Instant messenger: mrcoolbp2