Paint effects and Mental Ray
 

I noticed I can't render paint effects with Mental Ray (am I wrong?)

I figured out a simple solution: to convert the paint effects into a poly mesh. But, what about if I want to animate all that?

Is there another solution?

paint effects will not render in mental ray unless to convert it to polys.

Maya will keep all the stroke history so animation does not get lost in the conversion.

thanks for the answer roach105!

By the way, I'm trying to create a tree with paint effects. When I convert the stroke into polys everything goes ok. But when I try to manipulate the original stroke, everything goes slow! I can't even move my perspective camera without trouble. Is this something to do with the graphics card??? I have a Nvidia 5200 - 256- and 1 giga of ram memory.

my recommendation is to manipulate the stroke to what you need before converting.

I painted this tree for a composition I'm working on right now; it took me like 2 hours to get acceptable results (too many parameters: mesh, branches, flowers, buds, leaves, etc., etc.). At the end, the thing was hugh, specially when converting to polys: more than 3 million faces! Even with 1 giga of ram, Maya crashed badly.

Later I saw the problem: I had too many subdivisions (7 for each branch, 4 for each leaf and so on). I reduced all that and then, I got a nice 300.000 faces polygon tree...

Then I duplicated the poly tree and moved the copy a little to the right, faking a bigger tree.

I saw at CGTalk a different approach: render the tree in Maya software and then compose it with the rest. As I'm not sure how to do that, I chosed the first way.