Chaos Corona Forum
General Category => General CG Discussion => Topic started by: @matrix on 2016-01-28, 01:54:28
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Just curious because I havent even touched it since I got 3ds max. I went right to 3rd party render engines, but I did try Iray for a few images and it seems to have some potential. I heard mental ray is lower quality than Iray but I havent tested it out..
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I made a lot of school projects with MR and it requires a lot of learning to achieve good looking results, but it is possible.
Check out this set by our friend Ludvik: http://www.ronenbekerman.com/louis-kahns-esherick-house-3d/
Yup, MR.
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I use MR sometimes, only because it has texture baking. When Corona implement this feature I think I'm done with MR for good.
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the new MILA shaders are good. I think.
this was rendered with MR.
Though this is one doesn't claim to be realistic or correct.
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Just curious because I havent even touched it since I got 3ds max. I went right to 3rd party render engines, but I did try Iray for a few images and it seems to have some potential. I heard mental ray is lower quality than Iray but I havent tested it out..
It's free and it has a pretty awesome AO setup. Fast AO as far as I recall it's called.
Definetly better than the bullshit setup you have to do for Vray.
It's also quite old and has a good community around it. It does everything, but everything mediocre compared to today's engines.
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Back in the day it was my no. 1 choice. It was (and probably still is) extremely robust. It leant itself to a kind of "get it right or it won't render at all" mentality, which forced you to be really clean and accurate with your models and mats/lights. Other renderers of the day were throwing around all sorts of tricks for getting around bad geometry but MR was kind of steadfast and stubborn, which resulted in really good results if you played nicely with it. It also had some very pioneering tools such as render subset of scene, which was missing from all other renders for *years*. That and per-object AA controls etc. I gave talks at various places on how good MR was, and I meant it.
I made the switch from MR to Vray back in around mid 2011 because I was very impressed with Vray's general speed, particularly for exteriors, and for compatibility with the pool of freelancers around London at the time, who were basically all vray trained by that point. Trying to find talented MR guys was a total pain!
MR handled/s materials and lights very nicely. I always enjoyed working with it. Did some seriously big animation projects with it and loved the workflow and results. At the time it was a very sound option for any kind of work. I've not looked at it since, so I have no idea what it's like to use these days. For me, and most around me, "unbiased" renderers are now totally feasible in everyday production, so there's no reason not to use them. Iray still piques my interest from time-to-time because of GPU-acceleration, but the current VRAM limitations still make it unusable for us. That should change soon though from what I keep hearing. Interesting to see how that will change the game!
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I have very fond memories of MentalRay, it's the only thing my college had installed (I did not own computer during architecture college, but instead kept borrowing laptops of my girl dorm mates or spending time in school lab).
It was surprisingly easy with the tutorials from Jeff Paton I think. And it was super fast... I remember being able to get 1 hour renders on old quad-cores... The setup was meticulous (based on those tutorials) but if done right, it just worked.
It was more about being precise with those processes (like AtelierYork writes above), than anything complicated or what.
But then I installed the first alpha of Octane render (for which I had to borrow a computer again but with GTX285 this time) and forgot about MentalRay forever.
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I ditched MR ever since I started using Corona in 2013. I tired VRay, but never had the time to really get into it like I did with MR. It was really tedious settings wise, but materials were easy enough. I found MR to be very frustrating at times though, and once I tired VRay then Corona I realized how slow of an engine it was. I also tried iRay and liked it, but there was no point in continuing with it since I dropped MR, and now iRay is all but dead unless you're a car company. The community is very inactive/non existent compared to other render engines, and I find no point in GPU rendering anymore now that I have interactive with Corona.
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I ditched MR ever since I started using Corona in 2013. I tired VRay, but never had the time to really get into it like I did with MR. It was really tedious settings wise, but materials were easy enough. I found MR to be very frustrating at times though, and once I tired VRay then Corona I realized how slow of an engine it was. I also tried iRay and liked it, but there was no point in continuing with it since I dropped MR, and now iRay is all but dead unless you're a car company. The community is very inactive/non existent compared to other render engines, and I find no point in GPU rendering anymore now that I have interactive with Corona.
Yeah so much for GPU rendering, its absurd how much longer it takes me to render out a scene on Iray vs Corona and Iray is using both the GPU and CPU at the same time
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I'm keeping Mental Ray in my back pocket, only for animation. The ability to render a GI solution, every N frames is extremely beneficial, @ render time. 5-7 minute frames have no noise, (which can be extremely distracting). So, MR can render 5,000 'descent' images, in a reasonable amount of time- Valuable
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So can Vray in same pre-cached GI solution. I still believe it's extremely good option to have... maybe IR will make re-surfacement in Corona eventually as was originally in plan (and it was actually part of it in alpha).
Because GI animation (with complicated interiors for example), is simply financially not feasible currently in Corona.