same here... answers would be appreciated

I'm on Maya 5.0.1 BTW

damn? why's that?

[edit] ahh, you were faster :D

but that little tool really works nicely... the *.map files will work

and about the upgrade: maybe wait for 6?

kbrown if you're using maya 5.0 or lower, the mental ray renderer won't interprete *.hdr as High Dynamic Range images; you'll need a little commandline tool called "hdrtoxsi" (download the...

or how 'bout this?

...and skinned

(rendertime 2:14 minutes)

that's a P4 3.06 GHz with 1 Gig of RAM

here's a closer shot at higher rez.
this one rendered in under 4 minutes (!!)

(hint: tweak your BSP depth in the mental ray render globals, 40 seemed to be a sweet spot for this particular...

:) thanks kurt, just send me an email if you have questions, I could walk you through on ICQ

PS: no textures, no bump maps or anything; just pure displacement. rendertime under 2 minutes.

very exciting IMO

after days of fighting with this (countless crashes thanks to a somewhat lacking integration of mental ray) I finally had a little breakthrough yesterday.

note that this head is a pure poly model...