considering you're using a complex device known as a computer in a high performance setting, it's goes without saying you need to invest time learning the tools of the trade. You don't need to know all the math algorithms, but you do need a fundamental understanding of how a raytracer works (in comparison to a scanline or path tracing renderer, for example) so can set up your scene to render in reasonable time and make best use of resources. To expect to push a magic button that makes your art for you is unrealistic and not of the professional realm. That's how hobbyists think.
The point of renderers like mental ray is you can customize it to very specific needs while pushing the envelope with excellent performance in a variety of scenarios. Sure, there will always be weak spots, but that's true of any software. to put it into another light: As a professional animator/artist, you're analogous to professional race car driver, such as in Formula One. You will not be building the car, but you do need fundamental understanding of the engine, suspension, and other elements to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the vehicle so you can advise your team to tune it to the course and your driving style. You will also be required to adjust your driving style to accommodate any short comings in the vehicle's handling and/or design. You won't succeed if you don't put in the effort. Only in the simple case of going to the grocery store can you expect your car to be simple enough to turn a key, press the accelerator, and only worry about turning the steering wheel. In that scenario you're no longer pushing the envelope or competing in a professional capacity as you're dealing with a known quantity. Likewise, if you expect a renderer to be a push-button solution, then you're assuming the rendering process is simple and already figured out as a computer science problem that needs no further research. then, and only then, can a user interface be applied on top in a fashion as you expect because in order to provide such a user interface, you must know all the possible permutations/combinations of parameter settings and options that can be applied to produce the look you're imagining. Clearly that day hasn't arrived, so to expect to create imagery without any basic knowledge of a renderer is unrealistic and unprofessional. I've worked on several projects supporting mental ray as a lighting TD and shader writer. The primary reason productions like Barnyard had problems wasn't because of the technology. It was due to people failing to take the time to learn how to use it. A few specific examples: In the movie Barnyard, there is a shot of Otis jumping off a diving board and into a pond shouting "manabunga!" - part of the trailer. When the artist was rendering that shot at his desk, each frame was taking 5-6 hours at 1080p. After a few days of struggling to meet his deadline he called me over to his desk...which happened to be only 3 feet behind me because we shared the same office ;-). Anyway, after examining the shot, it was discovered his ray depths were at the default values which caused the rays entering the water to continually reflect for 10 bounces. After about 15 minutes of tests, I found he only needed rays to bounce twice to get the same end result while reducing render time to a few minutes per frame - a reduction of more than 25x. A problem created because the artist didn't have a basic understanding of how a raytracer works. Another example: Barnyard had problems rendering shots with more than 3 trees per frame before crashing out of memory. We were rendering very sparse scenes with maybe 7 trees total and a few side props such as a few rocks and bushes. These were backgrounds for the car scenes. The complaints coming out of the lighting department to the producers of the movie and Paramount pictures was that mental ray was the problem as it couldn’t handle the load - became very political issue as we still had shots of entire forests still coming down the pipeline. Again, I was called to look into the problem. After examination, it was discovered a single branch of leaves was instanced onto the trees using the Softimage particle system. Although there was only one branch of 10,000 triangles in the scene, it was instanced 200,000 times per tree. By the time the geometry was fully rasterized, there were more than 13.5 billion triangles for those 3 trees (or at least, 13.5 billion triangles at time of failure according to the mental ray diagnostics logs). The real problem is the artist didn't understand that instances must converted to full geometry for use in an an external renderer (this was before geometry standins existed). Once we reorganized construction of the scene, everything rendered as expected and sequences finished on the renderfarm in only a few minutes. I could go on with plenty more examples, but the point is (in my experience) most things people have griped about with mental ray are due to their own lack of understanding, not the technology. Matt Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2017 17:12:20 +0100 From: Mirko Jankovic <mirkoj.anima...@gmail.com> Subject: Re: end of another era To: "Official Softimage Users Mailing List. https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__groups.google.com_forum_-23-21forum_xsi-5Flist&d=DwIGaQ&c=76Q6Tcqc-t2x0ciWn7KFdCiqt6IQ7a_IF9uzNzd_2pA&r=GmX_32eCLYPFLJ529RohsPjjNVwo9P0jVMsrMw7PFsA&m=P5Qsb5ew7b3KyCKq9ZSV_RtlHRBljAHIMTwKi_Jz2Ro&s=LWXoxeTh0C7EVhDYt4o4d2KYpU-OHjTAP7Igu229RVA&e="; <softimage@listproc.autodesk.com> Message-ID: <CALOZhv2B-RwxU4UESR+v4Gs6H=h8dqxv8pp73ubkoljq8kg...@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" So in a nutshell same with maya you need team of TDs, programmers and tech support to actually use it to full potential. And someone wonders why it was pushed back so fast with other solutions? WHY would anyone have to go into knowing complex math behind the hub instead of actually focusing on what he should do.... make pretty images... ? On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 5:06 PM, Matt Lind <speye...@hotmail.com> wrote: > 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. > -- Mirko Jankovic *https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.cgfolio.com_mirko-2Djankovic&d=DwIFaQ&c=76Q6Tcqc-t2x0ciWn7KFdCiqt6IQ7a_IF9uzNzd_2pA&r=GmX_32eCLYPFLJ529RohsPjjNVwo9P0jVMsrMw7PFsA&m=TYkLqOztz1pMrehKIaRumz6JhntJjQjHv4bFhmqaE60&s=mTuAUFjEbMO5EHCskfL1UdDdCmXrmRo-stMb8uCvw60&e= <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.cgfolio.com_mirko-2Djankovic&d=DwIFaQ&c=76Q6Tcqc-t2x0ciWn7KFdCiqt6IQ7a_IF9uzNzd_2pA&r=GmX_32eCLYPFLJ529RohsPjjNVwo9P0jVMsrMw7PFsA&m=TYkLqOztz1pMrehKIaRumz6JhntJjQjHv4bFhmqaE60&s=mTuAUFjEbMO5EHCskfL1UdDdCmXrmRo-stMb8uCvw60&e=>* Need to find freelancers fast? www.cgfolio.com Need some help with rendering an Redshift project? https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.gpuoven.com_&d=DwIFaQ&c=76Q6Tcqc-t2x0ciWn7KFdCiqt6IQ7a_IF9uzNzd_2pA&r=GmX_32eCLYPFLJ529RohsPjjNVwo9P0jVMsrMw7PFsA&m=TYkLqOztz1pMrehKIaRumz6JhntJjQjHv4bFhmqaE60&s=NAtYcc6R8zOUbG6KJl8WvG0xPwqn3Y57bWsNre6dm1E&e= -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://listproc.autodesk.com/pipermail/softimage/attachments/20171121/216eeb47/attachment.html ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2017 17:27:11 +0100 From: Olivier Jeannel <facialdel...@gmail.com> Subject: Re: end of another era To: "Official Softimage Users Mailing List. https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__groups.google.com_forum_-23-21forum_xsi-5Flist&d=DwIGaQ&c=76Q6Tcqc-t2x0ciWn7KFdCiqt6IQ7a_IF9uzNzd_2pA&r=GmX_32eCLYPFLJ529RohsPjjNVwo9P0jVMsrMw7PFsA&m=P5Qsb5ew7b3KyCKq9ZSV_RtlHRBljAHIMTwKi_Jz2Ro&s=LWXoxeTh0C7EVhDYt4o4d2KYpU-OHjTAP7Igu229RVA&e="; <softimage@listproc.autodesk.com> Message-ID: <CAJwag8w7EnBfnHKbbSNk1CFExBOmjW7Y9k=oguz333_dty7...@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Because, in the end Mirko, math is freedom ;) 2017-11-21 17:12 GMT+01:00 Mirko Jankovic <mirkoj.anima...@gmail.com>: > So in a nutshell same with maya you need team of TDs, programmers and > tech support to actually use it to full potential. > And someone wonders why it was pushed back so fast with other solutions? > WHY would anyone have to go into knowing complex math behind the hub > instead of actually focusing on what he should do.... make pretty > images... > ? > > On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 5:06 PM, Matt Lind <speye...@hotmail.com> wrote: > >> 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. >> > > > > -- > Mirko Jankovic > *https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.cgfolio.com_mirko-2Djankovic&d=DwIFaQ&c=76Q6Tcqc-t2x0ciWn7KFdCiqt6IQ7a_IF9uzNzd_2pA&r=GmX_32eCLYPFLJ529RohsPjjNVwo9P0jVMsrMw7PFsA&m=1LVQ1fz-pV_hrx-RB7SBj3VwzuxeBqpjvexrXcBNXDw&s=FFtoPIKXkac_oAVzZGt17UhDu2N9v1rOqLAVYOhqq_I&e= > <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.cgfolio.com_mirko-2Djankovic&d=DwMFaQ&c=76Q6Tcqc-t2x0ciWn7KFdCiqt6IQ7a_IF9uzNzd_2pA&r=GmX_32eCLYPFLJ529RohsPjjNVwo9P0jVMsrMw7PFsA&m=TYkLqOztz1pMrehKIaRumz6JhntJjQjHv4bFhmqaE60&s=mTuAUFjEbMO5EHCskfL1UdDdCmXrmRo-stMb8uCvw60&e=>* > > Need to find freelancers fast? > www.cgfolio.com > <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.cgfolio.com&d=DwMFaQ&c=76Q6Tcqc-t2x0ciWn7KFdCiqt6IQ7a_IF9uzNzd_2pA&r=GmX_32eCLYPFLJ529RohsPjjNVwo9P0jVMsrMw7PFsA&m=TYkLqOztz1pMrehKIaRumz6JhntJjQjHv4bFhmqaE60&s=moCWsaxEFYrCEtaTgmMlYJ8KJKVrkbZKnVyyH2eXoog&e=> > > Need some help with rendering an Redshift project? > https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.gpuoven.com_&d=DwIFaQ&c=76Q6Tcqc-t2x0ciWn7KFdCiqt6IQ7a_IF9uzNzd_2pA&r=GmX_32eCLYPFLJ529RohsPjjNVwo9P0jVMsrMw7PFsA&m=1LVQ1fz-pV_hrx-RB7SBj3VwzuxeBqpjvexrXcBNXDw&s=7HKyQcJCT8rXKCAQXtm6l6A4FtdsSAcCbDsbrUHhN4o&e= > <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.gpuoven.com_&d=DwMFaQ&c=76Q6Tcqc-t2x0ciWn7KFdCiqt6IQ7a_IF9uzNzd_2pA&r=GmX_32eCLYPFLJ529RohsPjjNVwo9P0jVMsrMw7PFsA&m=TYkLqOztz1pMrehKIaRumz6JhntJjQjHv4bFhmqaE60&s=NAtYcc6R8zOUbG6KJl8WvG0xPwqn3Y57bWsNre6dm1E&e=> > > ------ > Softimage Mailing List. > To unsubscribe, send a mail to softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com > with "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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