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# 7 11-01-2003 , 12:49 PM
Jim's Avatar
Registered User
Join Date: Jun 2002
Location: Adelaide Australia
Posts: 201

re ugly mental ray render....

Hi there,

I'm sorry if I missed something from not reading all of the post re mental ray (I've been busy and Lazy).

This may have already been covered in another thread re GI and mental ray.

Here is some images that I rendered with mental ray tonight.
My machine is a P3 450, not the sort of machine that you would hope to batch render GI stuff in.

The first two are using just a single spot light.

Time to render 1 minute

Spots are good for Photon use because unlike point lights that throw light and photons in all direction spot lights concentrate the light and photons in a single direction which means faster renders.

the middle image (same as top left) but with GI turned on.

Time to render 3 minutes
Settings are:

Spotlight:
Energy 180,000 (all channels)
Exponent 2
Physical Yes

Area lights turn "Off" (Unless you want excessive render times).

Mental Ray render globals:

Global Illumination tab:
GI accuracy 800
Gl radius 1.35

photon volume accuracy 35
photon volume radius 1.0

Max reflection photons 20, 20, 40


The lower images are the same but with 'final gathering' turned on to "smooth" the rough global illumination.

Time to render 4 minutes

final Gathering tab:

final gather rays 100
Min radius 800
Max radius 1600

Sampling tab:
Min 0
Max 2

Jitter Yes
Gauss filter

Hope this is helpful to someone. With renders this quick one could easily render animations not just pretty single images.

re Jim


Mayan elder......only in years.....