progressive rendering in xsi2012, still not there?

[Maximus]

i didnt manage to have iray use full both cpu and gpu, in 2011 it only used CPU, in 2012 it only uses GPU, i think there must be some string option to tell it to use both.

and yeah, only mia_material is supported by iRay, any warning you get from iRay is mostly because the node you are trying to use is not supported.

[Nizar]

can be activate in 2011?

If it is so relative simple, why AD don't implemented this natively?

[IslandDreamer]

I must be doing something wrong. I've installed the various files as instructed earlier in the thread, but iray doesn't show up as a rendering option. Also, I'm not sure where to find mia_material. Pardon my noobishness!

[Hirazi Blue]

Can't help you with your iray woes, but the "mia_material" should be available from the "Render Tree Preset Manager" under the category "mental ray > Material"...

[gustavoeb]

use Architetural instead of mia_material. It is actually the same shader under the hood, but with a humanly readable interface ;)
good luck

[nunoalex]

Has anyone managed to get iray to go above 1000 samples?
Basically iray seems to stop when it reaches it and no matter what i can't make it continue in order to get rid of the grain

This is what is happening:
' WARNING : IRAY 0.12 warn : non-physical gamma value used in mia_exposure_photographic
' INFO : IRAY 0.12 info : increasing fragment size to 1646k to improve total performance
' INFO : IRAY 0.12 info : decreasing fragment size to 823k to prevent timeout
' INFO : IRAY 0.12 info : increasing fragment size to 1646k to improve total performance
' INFO : RC 0.4 info : progressive: stopping rendering due to max samples constraint
' INFO : RC 0.4 info : progressive: total rendering time was 180.46 seconds

[7eventh]

Just read that in Mental Ray 3.1 there is iRay 2.0 ...

http://docs.autodesk.com/MENTALRAY/2013 ... l#whatsnew

"iray 2.0
The iray version 2.0 is a major update of this rendering mode built into mental ray. It provides numerous improvements in performance and quality, like native support for BSDF layering in the rendering core. This version is using the latest release of CUDA, thus it is supporting, and will actually take benefit from, most recent GPU hardware, like the NVIDIA Fermi architecture."

Anyone knows if this will work in SI too?

[nunoalex]

Its still not integrated into Softimage if that is what you want to know

[7eventh]

Its still not integrated into Softimage if that is what you want to know

Actually I didn t expect it to be integrated by AD... its AD at least ;)
The question was more about integrating it "by hand"....like before...

[nunoalex]

I guess you should be able still to use the ctrl ghost shader, basically getting the same level of usability as previous SI versions, but we can only be sure once 2013 gets released which is due tomorrow i guess.

[Maximus]

I've downloaded 2013 today.
Lots of crashes using IP + FG, especially when render region open, and when switching on and off rebuild IP map. Nearly unusable to me.
Installed ctrl ghost, ta-daa! Geo shader is still not fixed, so forget to use IBL/progressive rendering and IP.
iRay still works if anyone is interested.

New subsurface scattering nodes added, they are kinda complicated to use, i didnt manage to make them work, since they arent packed as SSS compound or anything, they are just the pure nodes so i'm gonna take a while to figure it out considering the wonderful Help Docs.

useribl nodes (new IBL system from nVidia) not implemented.

bottom line: passed 1 year (more like 3), nothing new regarding Mental Ray. Good job.

HQ viewport is totally awful to me in terms of speed, as soon as you turn on something more than shadows it slows down a lot. Should have held this viewport back untill was finished, why even release some unfinished thing just to have users disappointed?

Kudos for max users enjoy your viewport navigation.

[nunoalex]

Yeap agree, Autodesk job on integration new features of Mental Ray in Softimage seems pretty much falling back, I remember the times when Mental Ray was better integrated in SI than Maya or Max, this has inverted after Autodesk bought SI basically.
Just my opinion though!

[gustavoeb]

nunoalex... dont worry they are all inconsistently bad

for exampla:
max has iray, but does not have the new SSS2, unified sampling and BSDF shaders
SI has unified sampling and SSS2, but no iRay, no BSDFs
maya has BSDFs but no iRay, no SSS2 no unified sampling

so all of them fall short somewhere. latest MR release though actually did show improvements, maybe things really changed after administation shakeup by nVidia, but there is far too much catch up to do (if they actually intend to do, which I am not confident about)

[Kzin]

nunoalex... dont worry they are all inconsistently bad

for exampla:
max has iray, but does not have the new SSS2, unified sampling and BSDF shaders
SI has unified sampling and SSS2, but no iRay, no BSDFs
maya has BSDFs but no iRay, no SSS2 no unified sampling

so all of them fall short somewhere. latest MR release though actually did show improvements, maybe things really changed after administation shakeup by nVidia, but there is far too much catch up to do (if they actually intend to do, which I am not confident about)

forget the bsdf. autodesk simply expose mi's example bsdf shaders. i did alot of tests with it and they are not production ready at the moment. first, you need a additionell bsdf input in the mat node for correct use and you dont have access to framebuffers with this nodes. they render faster, most time twice as fast as mia_mat for same quality (tested this on my current project), but you cant layer them, they have a fixed ior and they misses some more features that mia_mat has built in.
this shaders will also be overworked from mi to work better with unified, like alot of other shaders.
you can use it if you want with decleration append in base.mi for example. but for me, they are to limited at the moment. but i will do further tests with the new ibl stuff in 2013, perhaps its possible to get more out of it for some production stuff.

the mr situation in maya is way better then in si because you can expose all mr feature thru simple string options in maya, so its more or less feature complete. and lets wait what the next mental core release will offer.

[Maximus]

nunoalex... dont worry they are all inconsistently bad

for exampla:
max has iray, but does not have the new SSS2, unified sampling and BSDF shaders
SI has unified sampling and SSS2, but no iRay, no BSDFs
maya has BSDFs but no iRay, no SSS2 no unified sampling

so all of them fall short somewhere. latest MR release though actually did show improvements, maybe things really changed after administation shakeup by nVidia, but there is far too much catch up to do (if they actually intend to do, which I am not confident about)

forget the bsdf. autodesk simply expose mi's example bsdf shaders. i did alot of tests with it and they are not production ready at the moment. first, you need a additionell bsdf input in the mat node for correct use and you dont have access to framebuffers with this nodes. they render faster, most time twice as fast as mia_mat for same quality (tested this on my current project), but you cant layer them, they have a fixed ior and they misses some more features that mia_mat has built in.
this shaders will also be overworked from mi to work better with unified, like alot of other shaders.
you can use it if you want with decleration append in base.mi for example. but for me, they are to limited at the moment. but i will do further tests with the new ibl stuff in 2013, perhaps its possible to get more out of it for some production stuff.

the mr situation in maya is way better then in si because you can expose all mr feature thru simple string options in maya, so its more or less feature complete. and lets wait what the next mental core release will offer.

How you manage to enable new IBL in 2013?

[Kzin]

How you manage to enable new IBL in 2013?

i heard it should be possible, but we have to wait some days.
in the meanwhile, you can try to append the declaration, dont know if it works, no time to test 2013 at the moment.

the same for the ptex shader, should work now.