Sorry I didn't catch your
answer even though you were screaming it, your reply could have been a
documentary on renders I got lost in it :-)
I've been testing 3Delight, from their demo, I like how it renders, but
is there any hipcup when it converts Mental Ray shaders to Renderman, I
was told converting can sometimes be a bad thing. Too bad there isn't
some renderman nodes in Softimage :)
This is a tough choice, redshift makes unbelievable rendered images,
with the right knowledge you can turn out nice from Mental Ray just as
well. I look forward to the test scenes. If keyshot is good at stills,
and 3Delight is good at animation, does that make Vray a blend of the
two ?
Christopher
Friday, March 29,
2013 7:14 PM Well, i thought i made it
pretty obvious given the vray preaching i just did. If not here it is:
vray. Also, if you're not into animation, and more on the still
render side, you should definitely check out keyshot. Modo has a very
good renderer as well, but unfortunately i still haven't managed to get
used to its interface and shading system. I find them clunky, but that's
just personal bias. 3delight is also an interesting choice if you're
doing animation with tons of displacement, hair, dof and motionblur,
though i don't know what has been happening lately on its development
front. It used to have a free license for personal use, but i can't
recall if the offer was for xsi or maya.
But with the xsi platform in mind, i think redshift looks really
promising. Cpu's are expensive like hell. This could free up a
freelancer's budget if priced accordingly, and integrated correctly.
PS. I'll share that vray vs arnold displacement test scene
this weekend. See if we can get any real data.
Night,
Friday, March 29,
2013 6:41 PM
Thank you that was very
informative :) What render do you recommend to have besides Mental Ray ?
Christopher
Friday, March 29,
2013 3:35 PM Hey Christopher,
I
think i can give my 2 cents on maxwell, as i have been on its beta
as
well a few years back. This is from what was going on then. I
cannot
say anything about the current state of the engine as i have
not
touched it since.
Purely from a rendering standpoint, maxwell felt
slow, first and
foremost because it is an unbiased engine, and it
does not cheat its
solution. That means in order to get rid of the
sampling it needs to
do a ton of passes to get an accurate
convergence. What that meant for
me, as an individual, was that
animation was out of the question
unless i was willing to work with a
grainy image or if i chose to wait
a long time for the frames to be
rendered.
Most people these days rely on farms to render with maxwell
in an
animation environment (rendernet.se comes to mind).
This
was the low side of it, and i hear it is quite similar to arnold
from
this standpoint (good quality takes more samples which in turn
takes
a longer time to achieve). This is because both engines do not
precompute
or cache anything. Brute force is the word here, whereas
vray, even
if it does brute force well, it has a ton of other choices
to "cheat"
its way through, resulting in a faster rendertime, which in
turn,
unfortunately, requires greater knowledge from the user.
On the
upside, the shading system was nice, had the usual ubershader
approach,
tons of shaders available in the community. Did not use
light
sources, but instead turned objects into emitters using a
special
shader. That meant the shadows and everything else looked very
realistic.
Its preview system was way ahead of anything at that time
in terms
of seeing the final look of the image, in the first pass, so
you
could get a very good idea if you needed to adjust things before
waiting
for 2 hours. Now this has been updated to the maxwell "fire"
engine.
But most renderers today give you this (modo's preview or
vray's
light cache come to mind). By far the most useful feature of
the
engine for me, was its mxi image format (similar to a raw file),
which
stored lighting information from all the light sources. That
meant
if you had screwed up your exposure, lights etc, you could fix
everything
afterwards, and i don't mean brightness/contrast fix. You
could dial
the lights in and out, change their intensity, etc, and
everything
would update realtime in it's "image editor". I hear now
they have a
nuke plugin for this.
Worked for sequences of frames as well, and was
a lifesaver.
I remember this one time i had an interior to render
for a client, and
it had around 50 lights total.
The guy did a
dozen variations, changing colors and turning lights on
and off. Had
it not been for this feature,
i would have been rendering a week on
the project.
With it, i just waited a couple of hours, and then did a
dozen
variations in half an hour from the same render.
Final
thing i'd like to point out, was that its xsi integration was
not
that good nor stable back then.
Maybe now things have changed, but
last i looked, it was pretty much
the same workflow.
Cheers,
O
Friday, March 29,
2013 3:12 PM Hey Steven,
No
i have not directly. But having looked at arnold videos on
the net, with computer specs given, i can state that from what i have
seen, arnold is close to mantra in terms of displacement speed (which i
have used). So it is close to a reyes renderer in that sense. Again,
this is comparing what i know to what i have seen (but you can't really
cheat rendering speed).
Vray is definitely not that fast.
Friday, March 29,
2013 2:44 PM
What about Maxwell, which
render has lots it's potential ?
Christopher
Sent from my Desktop ;-)
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