Whether because they do animation, previz, game, or use another renderer, a huge chunk of Autodesk customers don't use mental ray and will never use it, so providing better mental ray preview is not a super obvious thing to do. nVidia's commitment to mental ray is very cloudy, this is definitely not obvious to start adding more dependency on mental ray in more product and turn users into using that.Kzin wrote:i think thats the problem. the users and ad talks about different thing then they talk about realtime viewport. the users i talk about when it comes to realtime viewport (mostly lighting/shading) always, ALWAYS thinks about a fast realtime feedback of the rendered scene and NOT a new opengl thing which is completly disconnected from the offline renderer. why not implement progressive rendering in the viewport, when you say iray will not be available. why ad is coding a completely new thing and not integrating current tech, short time wise? i think it would be good that ad states in which direction they want with it. what users they want to adress.
a great real time viewport architecture needs to be done by autodesk, a third party cannot implement that in the app. but third parties can implement plug-in offline renders. mental image should take up the work to work on the integration, just like every other third party does.
The demo Maximus posted above is a great third party preview tech in Maya. did you also see the OpenSudDiv demo from pixar in the maya viewport? To me this shows that autodesk is doing the right thing; these third party were able to implement these amazing things and get great performance with the viewport 2.0 API. IMHO That's effort better spent then just chasing the stuff from mental image, trying to get it to work, and then then disappointing because it rarely does what people think, or they won't use it. Everyone however uses the opengl viewport!
