Hi people. .. .

I'm just tired of using mental ray plugin. I need to find way to improve my render skillz.
Mental ray just looks to cold and dirty to me, and when rendering complicated scens wery often appears MENTAL RAY FATAL ERROR.
What's happening with V ray 4 maya. What's a good substitution 4 mental ray. Renderman???

Thanks,

If you can't handle learning Mental Ray then I'm afraid switching to Renderman isn't going to make things easier for you.

guess u're right. I dont have problems with handling mental ray, just often crushes piss me off.

Thanks anyway

crushes?

Well this is the sort of pointless question you get. The world works like this:

things that are hard to do, get a kind of wow factor for them. Once you make things easy you kindof take away the amazement factor out of them. Rendering is one such thing.

Rendering is a complex task of organizing primitives in a way that allows for fast lookup of them. Then based on that lookup do a shading computation and dump data out. Now while this entire task is not superficially rocket science, it gets very complicated very fast.

Let us take a analogy for illustrating this purpose. All humans can draw, and all humans can be taught to draw what they see. So making a photoreal rendering of what you see is more of teaching a human to observe the reality than anything else. This can be demonstrated by the fact that each and every natural scientist out there drew very detailed pictures of their observations before the camera was invented (just takes 2 years). If you think we would have come this far by just teaching thsoe who had a talent for it then you be sadly mistaken.

Now rendering has the same problem, in order toget something done in it you need person who undertsands the relationship between the computation and thier observation. This too can be taught out pretty easily (just takes 3-4 years), or it can be programmed into black box that fixes the problem for you. So somebody needs to do it And by giving out this ressponsibility for somebody insulates you form a choices. So on the otherhand you have this huge learning curve (whic isnt all that bad compared to other education areas), and the otherhand a bulk tool. Now the downside of teh bulk tool is it tends to do teh same thing over and over again.



Ok, so now that you have some metrics of how it looks cold and dirty, describe what it shoudl eb doing differently. The render does not magically make good looking pictures out of all meshes. So some level of modeling skill is needed. As is some texturing, also a sometimes dismissed factor is lighting wich makes 90% of the look withe the shader.

Back to the analogy. People with little drawing experience tend to make images that somehow look wrong. That is because they are not really in tune with reality, they are putting on papaer the kind of abstraction they think is there. So tehy are drawing a internal representation of their own inner world. But their brain does know what reality looks like on some level, and they can spent the difference. But because they are unable to correct thir inner view they cant correct the image.

So the key to solving your issue, here is for you to describe what exactly makes them cold. Then work on that part of the image.

PS: guys we could make a lightning compo where someone would make a simple scene, with no textures. And the only thing one could change is the lightning... to show off the effect of how lightning makes a real difference.

crushes?

1. "mental ray fatal error". ( occure when scene is complicated,manifesting with uncomplited render (even batch render) (all include, illumination, cautics, raytrace....)). Many people have same problem (crackrd version of course, but i hear some legal types of this plugin have same error). When fatal error show's up, its so complicated to reduce scene, sometimes more complicated then making it.

2. U're right about lighting, I really spend a little time setting it. I'm werry often using HDR lighting, with little additional lighting. But right now there is no need 4 putting plenty of them couse i'm rendering small number of objects.

3. When i said, to cold and dirty,.... well that is werry subjective opinion. I just want it to look werry commercial, like cell phone in commercials , i phone, i need that sharpness, environment....


I make difference between MAX V-ray and Maya mental ray (some people pointed to me), maybe i'm wrong becouse i'm not a pro. But i dont wanna make movies or real person itc..... I just wanna improve my self in commercial way...

Does anybody know what happen's with Vray 4 maya.

Thanks 4 all replys