MR vs Fake GI - Show Of Hands
 

Hey! I need a show of hands here... how many of you all here are using a simulated radiosity set up and who's using Mental Ray? Also, has any one here ever heard of Turtle for Maya? I 'm trying to see if they'll let me beta test it. Thanks for your cooperation everybody! :)

Russell

BTW, I finally decided to just settle for my old fake GI set up. It renders faster and looks just as good. :)

I've been getting well into mental ray at the moment and the whole image based lighting thing. But I get to use renderman at work anyways so :p ;)

Alan

well it all depends. if you have just one object and like a wight floor I would use like GI_Joe. In that since its not even a fake. if you need multy light bouncing and cooler bleading thin I would go with MR with FG.

So, basically put, I don't need to use both FG AND GI to get good results? No need for adding photons under the light's Mental Ray tab? I've been reading up on something called ambient occlusion and I was hoping I could get those kinds of results as well. Do you have long or short render times? I've had the hardest time getting my render times down. Even with 512 MB of RAM and a 1.8 GHz CPU and 128 MB Radeon graphics card, I still get slow renders. Do you have any suggestions? What are your usual settings? Are there EVER just "usual" settings? LOL! Thanks a lot!

Russell

ambient occlusion is a very cool technique. It's what we are using here at work at the moment. The only thing with ambient occlusion is that it is VERY slow to render. We are lucky enough to have 1000 procs to run it on but on a single proc machine... it's gonna take a while. There are some ambient occlusion shaders written for mental ray so that might be worth looking into.

here's a link for you too:
http://www.andrew-whitehurst.net/amb_occlude.html

As for the FG GI thingy, I just use final gather at the moment when I'm at home. I get pretty good results with just that. I havent really tried the GI option as of yet.

Alan