I just came back from the Los Angeles launch of 3ds 8. They made the huge announcement that Mental Ray 3.4 comes with unlimited render node licenses with 8. I could hardly believe it, Mental Ray has been such a tease, I have never bothered to use it because of the render node issue, but now you can net render on the same number of machines as 3ds Scanline 999. Pretty impressive.
The other new features seem pretty cool aswell. Vault seems really interesting aswell as pelt mapping and new skining tools. Can’t wait to get my hands on the sucker.
I wonder how Mental Ray will match up against Vray ?
Pelt mapping looks friggin awsome I wish I took some pics to show you guys. character studio finally has a heap of extra features to make it usable(Like euler curves) and mental ray has a realy quick AO setup and rendering.
but how can it compete with VRay’s speed, VRay just needs to ship with max.
I forgot to mention earlier they have some pretty excellent skinning tools, basically being able to skin mesh to the nearest bone - no more rescaling and also some presets for weighting verts. I love the idea of being able to use the motion mixer for animation on any object.
If you haven’t been on subscription you also get Hair and Cloth - altogether a pretty rounded upgrade. Check out the features over at Discreet - if you haven’t already :
yep, mental images has to bring the lincenses down, because well its harder and harder to compete nowdays. However, mental ray cannot beat vray in many features, such as architecture, speed, and various implementations that it’s too old to comprehand.
Release date is mid October. The vault feature is included in 8 with an amazing uni-browser that allows you to look through 3ds files without having 3ds on your machine.
There was a sneak of 64 bit at Siggraph, my gut is telling me that the subscription people will get 64 bit first and I have a feeling it might even be before Christmas. That was the habit for the extensions.
I have seen some great stuff done with Mental Ray - I am really curious to finally use it.
If you remember before, all maxuser maked the same dream which was:
Mental ray integration in max, now it’s here and nobody wants it :roll:
Strange no? hehe.