[Irinikus]

Thanks for the feedback.

I’ll have to take a serious look at fine tuning the Mental Ray renderer if it can produce a better output than the Maya renderer.

When I rendered this image, I just set the Mental Ray renderer to production quality and didn’t play with any of the other settings.

[gijoe77]

I was always under the impression mental Ray was the better renderer engine, not sure how true that is. I would love to see some compares to see if it really is the better product

[Intuition]

Mental Ray was bundled with almost all the major 3d packages (Maya, Max, Softimage) because it had subdivision at render time and really nice raytracing. Renderman wasn't a default raytracer for a while.
Renderman was very expensive comparatively to mental ray at the time.

Maya's native render engine isn't too shabby but has many hangups once you get past generic shapes/shadowing. I like playing with it but Mental Ray had quite a range of features by the time Maya 6.5 released. I haven't tested many of them on the Irix version though. I probably used it most during the Maya 8.5-2009 cycle.

Global Illumination and Final Gather... which can be used together to get a nice approximation vs using one or the other... which I'll doa tut on.
Caustics
Volumetrics
There was even a toon shader for certain releases but am unsure if that was post Irix era.
Mostly saw those toon shaders in use in the XSI release Mental Ray.

It isn't hard to tune Mental Ray but I'll make sure I give a breakdown of it at some point.

[Irinikus]

This is my latest rendering of this environment: