Question about Mental Ray.

# 1 27-07-2003 , 09:10 PM

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What is the differnece between Maya Software render and Mental Ray render? Why would u use one instead of the other.

Please Help, Thank You

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# 2 27-07-2003 , 09:44 PM

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Its mainly Raytracing capabilities...
Look the F1 help in regard to caustics, global illumination, etc...
I´ve noticed the materials translation between mental ray and maya´s native is not exactly perfect also...

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# 3 28-07-2003 , 07:14 PM

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mental ray is a standalone renderer I think. dragonFX is right though it's mainly about the raytracing capabilities of mental ray. maya software renderer is a scanline renderer (but it can also do raytracing i know!! user added image

) whilst metal ray does full raytracing.

Alan

Technical Director - Framestore

Currently working on: Your Highness

IMDB

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# 4 29-07-2003 , 07:24 PM

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Menatl ray has an additional cool feature i just discovered...

Trim surfaces would be cool if they actually trimed the surface insted of just making the trimmed part invisible...
The major problem is that when you render every nurb gives a different tesselation (for those of you who dont even know what tesselation means, it means that nubs actually convert to polys automatically just before redering)
On a normal nurb you can stitch surface borders so they seem to have continuity, on trim edges you cant.
Mental ray has a special way of tesselating nurbs, an as long as both surfaces are adjacent and in the same group it will make them to seem continuous... (ot doesnt matter if its a nurb ending isoparm+another or+a trim edge or 2 trim edges)
Which is cool cause that is the reason i was allergic to trims, and now can be used again... (trim options and conversion has to be enganced A LOT still, but...)
I include 2 images so you can see the difference

Edit: yes you can control tesellation paramenters, but to the surfaces to fit smoothly you can EITHER set them to insane polygon creation OR try to have both surfaces matching tesselation (which in curved trims can be funny...)

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Last edited by dragonfx; 29-07-2003 at 07:33 PM.

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# 5 29-07-2003 , 07:26 PM

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normal maya software

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# 6 30-07-2003 , 12:59 PM

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mental ray download at alias.com

I know that you can download Mental Ray 1.5.1 for Maya 4.5 is this true? I've seen the download on the alias.com website wich is renewed. But they give an error. Does anyone know where else I can download this.

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