pelos
http://www.dctsystems.co.uk/Houdini/hKickstartPrman.html [dctsystems.co.uk]

That's talking about Houdini2.5. I think one or two things have changed since then :-)

sorry for that, was the best i could find related of houdini using Mental ray.

For me Mental Ray is my renderer of choice both in Maya and Max. I can't say the same about Mantra, since I'm taking the first steps in Houdini and I didn't watch any tutorials about it yet (soon), but from the gallery I can see that Mantra can't get the same quality MR gets, at least for archvis. Once again I can only express my opinion based on the gallery but soon I'll have the opportunity to see for myself if Mantra will get me the same quality I'm used to (lets hope so).

can people please stop judging renderengines based on gallery pictures! have you ever been on the prman or 3delight site? what´s about their galleries? no fancy gi archivis images! so, does this mean that their renderer produces some poor quality output?
i know this has been said alot but neither mantra nor any renderman compliant renderer do have some “instant look great” button! you have to know what you are doing when using them. that´s the prize for the flexibility you get. and flexibility is the magical world when using renderer under production conditions.
no doubt, mental ray is a really great renderer, especially when it comes to gi but most of the time its not enough to press the “generate physical sky” button and using mi materials to get pretty pictures or even animations. and whenever you have to write your own shader or have to customize the renderengine you definitely will be happy using mantra or renderman.
don´t get me wrong but for someone who is writing that mantras quality can´t compete with mr i expect a bit more experience with both renderers than just looking on some gallery pictures.

petzibaerr
…don´t get me wrong but for someone who is writing that mantras quality can´t compete with mr i expect a bit more experience with both renderers than just looking on some gallery pictures.

Which part of “ I can't say the same about Mantra, since I'm taking the first steps in Houdini and I didn't watch any tutorials about it yet.” you didn't understood?

It's perfectly normal and even good for for the CG community to compare renderers or nowadays we wouldn't be using FG, GI and so on, because we'd be happy by using tecnology from 15 years ago!

pBarrelas: im totally agree with you im also using alot of maya.
and im not realy satisfied with mantra its either too slow or can't reach the quality i want(what i get with mr in maya). so what i do is mixed them
if i want procedural approach i use houdini and export to maya…
so far its working well for me..

I wish houdini has a better out of the box implementation of mental ray.

I have used both mantra nd MR and vray and arnold extensively and so far some of the fastest production rendering for me has been in MR.

transparencies, refractions, stable FG, unified sampling - blow mantra away.

it is not even funny.


mantra is great, its flexible, etc but sometimes I just want to knock out frames fast and MR has a HUGE advantage in that sense.

arnold is good too, speed wise. better than mantra tbh.

stooch
I have used both mantra nd MR and vray and arnold extensively and so far some of the fastest production rendering for me has been in MR.
.

Not sure how to read that tbh; this is in exact disagreement with what people say whom are skilled in rendering.

stooch
…
I have used both mantra nd MR and vray and arnold extensively and so far some of the fastest production rendering for me has been in MR.

I can see this could be true if you render without displacement, motion blur, depth of field while massively infrasampling. I guess production needs are different for everybody ;-)

edit: That being said, they might have actually improved things over the years after I have abandoned it. However the hair loss during MR productions will not grow back.

MartybNz

stooch
I have used both mantra nd MR and vray and arnold extensively and so far some of the fastest production rendering for me has been in MR.
.

Not sure how to read that tbh; this is in exact disagreement with what people say whom are skilled in rendering.

you are right. i guess 12 years of experience doesn't qualify me to have an opinion. sorry.

yes MR has improved massively in the past few years. There are cases where MR blows houdini away. of course everyone has different pipelines, my original post is just wishing for a better out of the box solution that let me use MR, not to sit here and debate about who is “skilled at rendering”.

and I do use motion blur btw, FG and raytracing, maybe it would behoove one to use the software in question recently before commenting on it??

Necroing a 5 year old post shows the general level of interest in Mental Delay around here.

Any development resources, other than Mantra would hopefully go towards supporting the next generation of GPU realtime renders:

Rendering Engine Mizuchi Tech Demo – “Museum”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYX9I3ONHc4 [youtube.com]

witch cases?

stooch

MartybNz

stooch
I have used both mantra nd MR and vray and arnold extensively and so far some of the fastest production rendering for me has been in MR.
.

Not sure how to read that tbh; this is in exact disagreement with what people say whom are skilled in rendering.

you are right. i guess 12 years of experience doesn't qualify me to have an opinion. sorry.

yes MR has improved massively in the past few years. There are cases where MR blows houdini away. of course everyone has different pipelines, my original post is just wishing for a better out of the box solution that let me use MR, not to sit here and debate about who is “skilled at rendering”.

and I do use motion blur btw, FG and raytracing, maybe it would behoove one to use the software in question recently before commenting on it??

I think your post is great and useful.
Thanks for sharing here.

MartybNz
Necroing a 5 year old post shows the general level of interest in Mental Delay around here.

Any development resources, other than Mantra would hopefully go towards supporting the next generation of GPU realtime renders:

Rendering Engine Mizuchi Tech Demo – “Museum”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYX9I3ONHc4 [youtube.com]

well.. i dont like to start threads if they already exist… I was looking for “mental ray in houdini” so sorry if anyone is upset over my necroing.

that is a pretty cool demo. i have played with a few myself in various other 3d packages.

What is curiously absent, is what i love about mental ray though… is its refraction tracing. Also im not sure how many of the blurry reflections in the demo are actually traced and how many are mapped… the dof looked a little off… its not bad but Im happy with basic GI diffuse shading with mantra… where it really hits the wall is blurry reflection/refraction tracing, smooth results just take too much time, the unified sampling is really working awesome in MR too.

im rendering to 4k, have blurry refractions. The only reliable way to get a clean image is to increase pixel samples and find a good balance of max rays and variance settings. Ultimately what i would love to have is some kind refraction ray interpolation like MR. Grain is ok for film alot of times, but im going for beauty so id like it clean and quick.

mantra is definitely a good render engine and for lots of the typical effects rendering it is a great render engine. I wouldnt say its the fastest in the world though.

You can romanticize M-ray all you want, but I'm here to tell you that Mentalray is old and deprecated and you won't find much user support around here.
I've been a long time Softimage user and for a good time M-ray was the only rendering engine available. Its global illumination techniques are incredibly hard to use for animations and the results are from optimal even when produced by very experienced users.
The unified sampling is a recent thing and a good one (although not the best around either), but for most of its life M-ray just had the old aliasing method.

M-ray might be fast compared to others, especially unbiased engines (Mantra PBR, Arnold, Maxwell) when dealing with a simple scene - a few refractions/reflections, your usual architectural scene - but as soon as computationally expensive things (m-blur, dof, displacement, hair) start to pile up it's good night M-ray.

last time i checked ( a few weeks ago maybe) mental delay still cannot render maya fluids with deformation motion blur, still boosts the rendertime skyhigh with motionblur, dof is also forever, and try rendering several million particles . I really dont know why anyone would use mental ray apart from being free with maya. I use mantra and prman daily. imho mantra is the ultimate renderer just because of its ease of use with shaders and vex and etc.

Right on tricecold
However let me be the devil's advocate for a moment here: as bad as M-ray is, some of its shortcoming occurring in Autodesk's packages it's their fault, not Mental Images' (now nvidia) - as far as I know Adsk does the implementation. Softimage had the best one (and probably still does) but when it was acquired by Adsk it started to lag in that department as the other two.

I'm not 100% sure but I think I read somewhere that Maya 2016 doesn't even have M-ray any longer - it's available as a plugin. It goes to show something something…

McNistor
Right on tricecold
However let me be the devil's advocate for a moment here: as bad as M-ray is, some of its shortcoming occurring in Autodesk's packages it's their fault, not Mental Images' (now nvidia) - as far as I know Adsk does the implementation. Softimage had the best one (and probably still does) but when it was acquired by Adsk it started to lag in that department as the other two.

I'm not 100% sure but I think I read somewhere that Maya 2016 doesn't even have M-ray any longer - it's available as a plugin. It goes to show something something…

I worked on the integration of mental ray for Softimage|XSI for 10 years. I removed the mental ray support from Houdini in H13. It did not feel wrong.

back in the day Softimage was the first package to adopt mental ray as native render. while you still needed to buy it as a plugin for max. then maya
(cant believe that Maya still have hardware render and other legacy's).

was in the days where you needed mental ray light, mental ray materials etc… well like any other render that couldn't use the package lights and materials.