Massive Artist Log # 2
16 October 2008 14:07 Filed in: Work-การงาน
Mental Ray
Rendering and General Pipeline Integration
Part two of my Massive Artist Log will describe the pain and pleasure of actually using Massive with Mental Ray.
I have used Mental Ray (MR) before, back when it was still in beta stage with Maya (and earlier with Softimage | 3D, but that’s an ancient history). I continued to use it through out my entire career of VFX production. It is a good renderer with some catches. The main gripe is its limited memory management ability. People all over the world who have used MR in production usually run into the out of memory error on the 32-bit platform/build.
A lot of MR features are also afterthoughts, such as scene description file (.mi). These files did not exist in earlier day of MR when it was an integrated renderer in 3D packages. Learning by the (good) example set forth by RenderMan standard, Mental Images came out with a very sensible format of .mi files. Although, one can see the very root of .mi file through its syntax of pure C programming language. This is also the case of RenderMan .rib files as well.
The usual way of rendering using MR is to generate .mi scene description files from a 3D package, completed with geometry description, shader description, light, camera, output and everything in between. Then the user call the command line MR standalone (ray) to process these files and writes out render images.
For Maya, the menu [File/Export all (selection)] and select mentalRay as your choice of format to export, will do the job of writing out .mi files.
For Massive the menu [Run/Sim] and select the mi output option will write out .mi files ready for render as well.
Other ways of rendering with MR in these two packages are :
- Interactive current frame render in Maya GUI (choosing MR as renderer of choice from the render menu set).
- Run Maya batch to render Maya scene with MR (support both GUI and CLI), this will withhold the .mi file generation and go directly to write out final images.
Part two of my Massive Artist Log will describe the pain and pleasure of actually using Massive with Mental Ray.
I have used Mental Ray (MR) before, back when it was still in beta stage with Maya (and earlier with Softimage | 3D, but that’s an ancient history). I continued to use it through out my entire career of VFX production. It is a good renderer with some catches. The main gripe is its limited memory management ability. People all over the world who have used MR in production usually run into the out of memory error on the 32-bit platform/build.
A lot of MR features are also afterthoughts, such as scene description file (.mi). These files did not exist in earlier day of MR when it was an integrated renderer in 3D packages. Learning by the (good) example set forth by RenderMan standard, Mental Images came out with a very sensible format of .mi files. Although, one can see the very root of .mi file through its syntax of pure C programming language. This is also the case of RenderMan .rib files as well.
The usual way of rendering using MR is to generate .mi scene description files from a 3D package, completed with geometry description, shader description, light, camera, output and everything in between. Then the user call the command line MR standalone (ray) to process these files and writes out render images.
For Maya, the menu [File/Export all (selection)] and select mentalRay as your choice of format to export, will do the job of writing out .mi files.
For Massive the menu [Run/Sim] and select the mi output option will write out .mi files ready for render as well.
Other ways of rendering with MR in these two packages are :
- Interactive current frame render in Maya GUI (choosing MR as renderer of choice from the render menu set).
- Run Maya batch to render Maya scene with MR (support both GUI and CLI), this will withhold the .mi file generation and go directly to write out final images.
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