A lot of people don't know this, but mental ray received a HUGE update last year with acceleration as much as 20x for global illumination and related. The version that ships with Softimage didn't receive this update, of course.
After acquiring mental ray, Nvidia let it rot for a few years before deciding they should put effort into it after all, then put significant work into it, but not until after many people went to other options. As much flak as people put towards mental ray, it's actually a very good renderer, but it requires you have knowledge of raytracing algorithms to make best use of it. The problem is most users only used the interactive version which was hamstrung by the XSI interface which created most of the problems related to crashing due to memory constraints and other issues. If you ever used mental ray from the command line on it's own, you'd know it was actually very fast and stable. If it had continued to be included as a standalone renderer after XSI v2.x, it would've been more popular as those serious about rendering would've gone to the command line and/or written their own scripted UI for it such as with Qt. Classic case of marketing ruining a product's profitability. My only complaint as a shader writer was that mental ray was overly compartmentalized which sometimes made it difficult to access parts of the scene to create comprehensive shading effects. What you could do with a single uber shader inside another renderer, required teamwork between multiple smaller shaders in mental ray. It was also not documented very well in the advanced areas. You had to really figure it out on your own. While the documentation was accurate, a lot of it didn't make sense until you already know how the renderer worked. But once you did, you had a lot of power at your finger tips. Matt Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2017 09:01:52 +0100 From: Olivier Jeannel <facialdel...@gmail.com> Subject: Re: end of another era To: Anto Matkovic <a...@matkovic.com>, "Official Softimage Users MR wasn't heaven, but it's again another widely used abandonned software. Of course the provider will never tell the user that he has stop its development, no, instead the users finds out waiting months, then years, that nothing happen or changed on the platform he thinks everything is fine. ------ Softimage Mailing List. To unsubscribe, send a mail to softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm.
