Nvidia/mentalray & autodesk accointance

[fraggle]

Hello,

Looking at the integration beetween hardware/software from 2007 to now, it will be very hard for other render engine to survivein the near furthur.
I'm afraid this accointance will kill the competition and slow down progress done on this segment.

What do you think?

Thanks

[joconnell]

so far mental ray's newest features seem to be largely based on catching up with Vray's ideas, and we've seen what being in house with autodesk and having to work to the ideas of a board of shareholders has done for 3dsmax. Vray is being developed independently by people that care about the quality of their product and don't have the same restrictions that the in house coders do in autodesk. I reckon it'll be fine!

[vlado]

Looking at the integration beetween hardware/software from 2007 to now, it will be very hard for other render engine to survivein the near furthur.
I'm afraid this accointance will kill the competition and slow down progress done on this segment.

This may be true, but people have been saying the same thing since mental ray was integrated in 3ds Max 6 back in 2003.

Best regards,
Vlado

[raymarcher]

Nvidia and Autodesk are large companies that don't have the flexibility like Chaosgroup so I would not be worried. 3ds Max team hired Master Zap but don't expect any wonders.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

The integration between 3ds max/maya and mental ray is horrible at its best moments. Mental ray has tons of features that are hidden/unavailable in AD products. On top of that MR development its very chaotic. They release a lot of new stuff and 60% of it is bugged and unusable. On top of that U cant get Nightlies updates with MR as u can with Vray. Their policies and so on stop it from happening. To get a simple thing fixed it has to be Fixed by Nvidia, send to AD for approval, send to user. Which is not happening and wont happen, autodesk SAP policies and other offers are anti user. The only way to get bug fixed is to buy AD 20xx verion next year. I would be more skew towards idea of AD dropping of MR as their main render engine and going towards V or other one or just going solo. The only bad thing that can happen in future is if AD buy Chaos. - NO NO NO. One of reason why MR is going as plugin in 2013/2014 maya release is that so Nvidia can have a little more say and actually be able to release patches and so on. Which I think its not something they want to do on upper management level - I know their coders want to help or at least Bart. MR main user core is High end companies 100+ employers big render farm loads of MR standalone licenses. They can get support from nvidia, but users like we or small companies - forget about it babe.

[LudvikKoutny]

Quite contrary actually. The fact that people at Autodesk are handling integration of the renderer they have no idea about, is the reason mental ray is rapidly losing last bits of it's userbase. The integration is simply horrible and even such things like scene translation are much better handled by 3rd party renderers, like as Vray.

Softimage had the best mental ray integration of all packages... HAD... That state ended as soon as it has been acquired by Autodesk, and now Softimage's MR integration could be categorized as the worst of them all.

All the new MR features are integrated in the way they are incredible pain to use (they messed up light units conversion for example, so if users want to work correctly, they have to do very ugly workarounds, but luckily, most of then don't even know what LWF is ), and Softimage is only package that doesn't have iRay yet, even when it's the only 3D software in Autodesk's portfolio that has user interface suitable for some form of interactive rendering workflow.

So yeah, that's the current situation

[IVOR_IP]

Everything Autodesk touches turns into sludge, trying to do much with too many products that's acquired and not necessarily compatible. Now they are trying to stuff iRay into autocad, its a complete mess. As far as rendering, the only bright spot is the strategic acquisition of octane, otherwise all the cloud-based initiatives are useless for professionals that just want to get the job done.

[fraggle]

Octane have been acquired by Autodesk!
One less competitor!!!

Everything Autodesk touches turns into sludge, trying to do much with too many products that's acquired and not necessarily compatible. Now they are trying to stuff iRay into autocad, its a complete mess. As far as rendering, the only bright spot is the strategic acquisition of octane, otherwise all the cloud-based initiatives are useless for professionals that just want to get the job done.

[Franx]

..strategic acquisition of octane,...

Where did you get that from?