Glossy Fishy

[Basse]

In maya you have to go into the Plugin Manager and check ObjExporter so that's activated. Check both Loaded and Autoloaded.

The *.obj importer to max is called obj2max and the exporter max2obj.

obj2max:
http://www.habware.at/max4/obj2max4.zip

max2obj:
http://www.habware.at/max4/max2obj4.zip

[andrius]

I spent 2-3 weeks tweaking GI in Mental Ray before giving up, each test render took 1 hour, and I never rendered anything worth showing. Sure they claim it works well, like my clients always ask me to render out a shere in a corner , but I haven't seen anybody produce any GI image worth anything. In maya at least, I hear MR in softimage is leaps and bounds better than MR in maya. Of course there is also Turtle renderer for maya which supports GI and FG and HDRI and ... but that is fairly new and the jury is still out with that one.

Thanks to VRAY for raising the bar!!!!

[586]

Thanks, Basse! I'll try this =)

[HY]

Great Job with the materials indeed. Be nice if these were donated tothe VRay materials library.

[egz]

Just posted a small material update tonight:

http://vray.info/materialbeta.asp

[KenKoala]

MR:
Slower
GOT DAMN NICE QUALITY!!!
Not that userfriendly for us mortal.

I agree mate. We have switched over to use Maya/MR as our visualisation tool. To be totally honest, I haven’t seen anything I would like to sign my name to yet. Our tech guys are still trying to get their heads around MR and how inconsistent the output is. To get the most out of MR you need the stand-alone version, which dose not come cheap.
I have been using Vray at home and have found it a hell of a lot easier to use and it is faster with having great quility. To do glossy/DGS materials for example is quite a lot more complex within MR compared to Vray and this is only the beginning of it. I haven’t done any animations yet in Vray but by the sounds of things it’s relatively easy. In Maya we have FG flickering issues where we have to increase the samples to reduce flickering which then increases rendering time. You can’t win.
As soon as Vray is out for Maya I'll ditch Max assuming that it is stable etc.

[stefan]

Buahaha, KenKoala man! I couldn´t find better words. In fact I almost used the same recently somewhere else on this forum. The day Vray for maya comes out I throw max out of the window.

In fact I did a little testing of Maya and Mental Ray the last couple of days.
The way Mental ray is integrated still feels a little crude. By default Alias even hides the mental ray render nodes from the user unless he sets a certain environment variable. Right now it looks more like a hit the render button and see what happens solution, although i must agree most of the scene elements will be translated for you automatically there´s still a ton of features that don´t work properly. My favourite is this:

"Windows crashes when you render scenes with high poly counts
(e.g. 1,000,000)"

Workaround:

Turn off Scanline Rendering in the Render Globals or reduce BSP Depth to something like 20 to allow the scene to render. "

They forgot to add the following line:

"Kiss your render times good bye".

There are a couple of other issues with particles, area lights, GI, you name it. The list is longer than my arm.

eg something I couldn´t get to render properly was a skylight setup with a hdri as an environment. I used the standard maya environment shader in the mental ray slot of the camera. Actually it rendered decently fast (much faster than with a real geometry sphere as a background) but with lots of artifacts (grainy buckets around corners) that i couldn´t get rid of even with high values for antialiasing and final gathering. Maybe it works if you use the Mental ray shaders directly, but I couldn´t get them to render. The reference material shipping with Maya5 is a bit scarce on this subject. Hope you guys have more success with it.

Pretty please Vlado, get Version 1.1 out and make somebody work on the Maya connection to Vray. Although I think this software hasn´t deserved such a good renderer Actually, if I had to choose I´d prefer XSi a million times over Maya, but I guess chances for an XSI port are closer to abuslute zero than the average temperature in space, aren´t they?
XSI Vray´ed. Oh yeah baby, the ultimate 3d application.

Enough daydreaming,

Stefan

[Basse]

Just posted a small material update tonight:

http://vray.info/materialbeta.asp

Cool! And thx for the great materials

[3dform]

I wish Vray for Maya would be out and you all would switch to maya. Then I start counting the days till you sitch back to Max.. won't take long.

No really: Most of you know the pain to use Max, but do you know the pain using Maya? Sure, you have to learn that first.

Anyhow, we are not here to discuss this. I just wanted to note a view experiences:

- MentalRay can be very Powerfull mostly in his prize. I have been working with MR since 5 years, it makes great pictures if you don't have to render an animation, else it takes all you renderfarm. Personaly I think MR has a function like:

If (user want's to do animation) then
{add (flickering) till (user buys 5 times more render licenzes)}
else
{add shaders like hell till user get's grazy}

- About conection to Maya: I did a lot jobs for companys that witched from Maya to Max and had many files in Maya. On exporting geomtrie you loose smoothing information which is very sad. Exporting a camera can be hell too. And backing of animation can take ages in Maya.
We had one case when Maya was doing a preview rendering (viewport) slower then Max Scanliner was doing the final rendering.
Well, not all is bad in Max.

robert

[Basse]

Here's a pic I did with Mental Ray 2.1 in Max 3.1 coulpe of years ago.



And yes I know the pain in maya. The default render sux! That's why I use max for it. And ofcourse all apps have it's flaws.

About exporting geometry.

Loose smoothing info? Works totally fine for me. Exporting camera works super fine if you use an app like Deep Exploration.

Finally, this whole discussion started by someone asked me about using maya instead for max. That's my choice nothing more.

[3dform]

You say smoothing works for you using obj?

I loose all information here when importing Maya geometry the objects are not smoothed anymore.

When do it so other way my Max Modell has got every edge smoothed in Maya which looks horrible too.

regards,

robert

[Intenzity]

The plugin I use to import in Maya and I know Max has it too is the FilmBox plugin by Kaydara. www.kaydara.com

May want to check that out.

[Basse]

I use this option:

[prey1979]

i was wondering how easy or not easy maya is for modelling i keep hearing its modelling tools are way better than max's.... im curious about maya and was thinking of downloading the personal learning edition i rember they where offering it i should check if they still do ... but what are the benefits in modeling in maya?

[Basse]

For me it's mostly small stuff. Like in max if you are cutting an edge around a sphere you can't stop cutting to rotate the view without ending the cutting process. Most of the tools just works better. Then you have the whole interface workflow in maya. It work so much better to get to the menus. The SPACE thing shows pretty much the workflow when it comes to accesing menus.

But remember. This is what I like. I can't say that Maya IS better than max. For me it is.