[Irinikus]

I've just started on a display environment for the speakers that I'm currently building in Maya.

Heres the start I've made:

[Irinikus]

I took two photos during the rendering process to specifically point out the efficient usage of RAM, as this system only has 6GB of it at the moment:





I have not yet created all of the speaker modules for this system, so I have just placed it in a line array format for demonstration purposes.

I still have a long way to go with the development of this environment, but here's the progress so far: (The Tezro is now starting to battle with the number of vertices in this scene!)



The difference that an outside environment makes:

[Intuition]

Mental Ray or Maya renderer? Looking very slick.

[Irinikus]

Mental Ray or Maya renderer? Looking very slick.

Thanks!

I’m still making use of the Maya renderer.

[Irinikus]

Heres the latest rendering, and enough for the weekend! (Adding a touch of realism.)

[BrainStorm]

I just showed this to my very untechy mother, and I thought her head was going melt lol! Great design work!

[Irinikus]

I just showed this to my very untechy mother, and I thought her head was going melt lol! Great design work!

I'm glad your mom liked it!

[Intuition]

It looks like there should be more direct light coming in from the window? Is there glass in the windows blocking the rays? Otherwise it is looking quite cool. I even see some soft shadow fall off.

[Irinikus]

There is glass in the window.

I’m busy with a rendering using mental ray, as I’ve increased the scene complexity to a point where the maya renderer simply won’t render the scene anymore.

From what I can see currently, the output isn’t quite as good as the maya renderer, but at least it’s rendering!

Mental Ray also seems to make use of the CPU’s in a different way, as they’re not all running flat out. (They take turns!)

I haven't changed any settings, and my lighting is now messed up, I'll just have to see how this goes:



It turns out that the system was running out of memory with the Maya Renderer, I reduced the size of the Picasso images bit and it's now rendering!




Here's the Mental Ray output:




Here's the Maya Software output:

[Intuition]

Yeah, Mental Ray is feature heavy. It can do much better than the Maya renderer but it also requires a bit more tuning. It will do a decent approximation of the Maya shaders but you'll also notice it has a different way of seeing the reflectivity/specular contribution as you can see the falloff on the speakers has added a generic reflection amount which is why you have the highlight area blowing up to white. Mental Ray can do a few more tricks with reflection/refraction and even volumes.

I can't remember if it can do caustics as early as 6.5. Probably as I seem to remember there being a switch for it in the GI settings. GI and Final Gather are also tricky. Often times you would just see people use FG if it was just for stills as you wouldn't have to worry about the flickering. You may want to try turning off "casts shadows" on the shape node of the window glass. This way you can get mild reflection but it will let the direct light rays through instead of just the reflection you see on the floor.

I like the rails. They look rather snazzy.

I also can't remember if we could do linear lighting workflow 2.2 gamma as early as 6.5 Mental Ray. I know I've been able to cheat it but am not really sure since SGI defaults away from 2.2 gamma output. This helps in the white blown out and too dark blacks ending up being a bit closer to what a human eye where you still see detail because your eye can expose for brighter light or darker light and still make out details. This is stuff I'll cover in a Maya tutorial just for Rendering on its own.