Mental Ray is all the rave over on the AUGI/Revit 2009 forum. This one got a bunch WOW’s! Now next to Accurender it looks pretty good, but you V-Ray guys who were worried… don’t be 
Okay, but…
That image is terrible. Can’t imagine anyone going “wow” over that :roll: does not look like the work of a (semi) professional.
But… in all fairness… this picture is not really an accurate benchmark on what Mental Ray is capable of. I am a VRay nut as well but I’m also not blindfolded 
Take a look at this website for instance. It has some higher quality artworks in their gallery : http://www.mymentalray.com/
It’s not (all) architecture but it does show a bit of the true Mental Ray.
Again, I’m not exactly a Mental Ray fan and it can’t really compare to VRay but it is also not as bad as some people say
Just my humble opinion of course 
If you see what Revit used to do with accurender… that image is a wow. Been trying out Revit 2009, and while the render engine improvements are nice, I feel they still aren’t in the same league as 3dsmax and VRay 8), not even close.
Mental Ray
The Revit Mental Ray engine is stripped down, but it seamlessly transfers to MAX. It would probably take just as much time to make an image look good in MAX using Mental Ray as it does in V-Ray. I think people will be disappointed when their images are not even close to what you guys produce. All it will do is give more credibility to the real artists!
Are those clouds in the mental ray sky? In the augi thread there’s another image that looks vaguely like there’s clouds in the sky too.
Also the guy at the augi forum says it took 58 min on his laptop to produce that image so I’m not sure how fast the engine is optimized. To me it still looks like there’s some GI noise in it as well.
sky
yes, it does have a cloud system. I’ll do a screen cast tomorrow and post it.
revit 2009
I think it uses a set of images to produce the background. You can specify how cloudy you want it. Here is more info about the interface:
I downloaded this tutorial file, opened it and just hit render. This is what I got:
It took about an hour on my octa core using the preset high settings. I noticed the processors weren’t running at 100%, they where about 57%. I don’t think anything can be done about the tiling in textures with the very limited options the program has.