Now that Max 6 is out...

[YoyoBoy]

Probably too early to ask this but: does anyone know yet how Mental Ray in Max 6 compares to VRay?

[RErender]

Can't touch V-Ray on speed.

[vance3d]

does mental ray support render elements, ie reflections, shadows all that stuff?

V miller

[cocolas]

yeah, it does support all that, but as rerender wrote, you can't compare it to vray as far as speed and predictabity....
plus vray's shader are much more predictable and easy to use then mental ray's.......
this topic kinda touches on it.....a bit.
http://www.chaoticdimension.com/foru...20fish&start=0

paul

[3dform]

I know MR now since 7 years... many things have changed, but one... MR is much faster, if you do displacement or GI with some simple objects.. WOW what speed!... But, if you do both in a more complexe scene, then prepare on long render times. The big problem with Raytracers in general (exception Vray) is that you can't guess the rendertime when doing first tests. You have so many parameters, tools and stuff, that even a long time veteran can't optimize them all. And, worsed at all, every scene is different.

The bad things in MentalRay:

- Big need for AA when doing Animation, very slow too.
- Lot of parameters that are not easy to use.
- hundrets of shaders, but no complex material.
- GI does a bad job on edge detection (thin walls etc...)
- Long time to setup.
- Unexpected long rendertimes. (you can't guess)
- alien inside Max (it's simple different to native Max)
- render licences

The good things:

- superbe integration (almost like Vray)
- superbe support by discreet
- Many shaders for everything.
- good quality
- some great features like Hair naitive support, displacement with direction, lot of control features, Glow and Effects... etc.

In my opinion it can be compared to Brazil best. Anyhow I like Brazil more.

In different to Vray, MR is to slow and not easy to use, it's also expensive! But MR has got many small things we should have in Vray too,

regards,

robert