MentalRay question?
 

Hi everyone, happy new year:)

I've been reading a few of the posts here regarding mentalray as an excellent alternative to maya's native renderer. Now I know Mentalray has some really nice features such as GI,FG etc but in my experience these rendering options are out of the question when doing any form off final animation due to very high render times, so these leads me to ask is there any point using mentalray over maya's native renderer if your not able to use these fancy & expensive effects? I mean does Mentalray offer higher render quality or is it simply alot faster?
I know maya's renderer is slow but i've seen some really nice quality output from the standard renderer (The Living Forest), most of the time effects like GI,FG are faked (in film anyway) for the final render.

Hope someone can enlighten me, thanks James.:)

It all depends on the project. If you are doing a single image, it may be worth the extra render time in MentalRay. But then again you can come up with some very nice renders in Maya using a bit of raytracing and good lighting. For animations it would depend on if you really need those effects or not. There are other renderers out there to fake them and they may be quicker, but the quality is lacking.

Let the project dictate the workflow....sometimes it's about meeting a close deadline and sometimes it's about taking the time to create the highest quality images. There are no rules set in stone other than do whatever needs to be done :)

Darkon