Maxc Posted April 7, 2017 Share Posted April 7, 2017 It's had some issues in the past admittedly but that tide may have turned. I'm quoting Andrew Hazelden who has made a lot of lens shaders, including the Domemaster set for both Mental Ray and Vray which we use for stereo equirectangular in 3dsmax and Softimage. "Mental Ray used to work with Houdini back in 2010 but no one has really ventured into using it as an option in the mean time due to lack of support from the developers and end users. The version of Mental Ray 3.14 Standalone that comes with every new paid license of Mental Ray 3.14 for Maya or 3Ds Max would be able to render a Houdini exported mental ray .mi scene file. Also the latest mental ray release has some really nice GPU rendering modes with improved global illumination that has started to make it almost usable again, and I'm a bit partial to the mental ray lens shader support as it works on both the CPU and NVIDIA GPUs now. https://forum.nvidia-arc.com/showthread.php?15796-Mental-Ray-3-14-Standalone-and-Houdini-16&p=64071#post64071 The NVIDIA reply is it depends on how much interest there is from the community. I think it would be a good thing and it may well work out a cheaper option than Redshift and Octane with the benefit of old school CPU. Andrew has some great tools for cinematic VR too. https://www.andrewhazelden.com/blog/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LaidlawFX Posted April 7, 2017 Share Posted April 7, 2017 ...2010... :/ I think they would have to create it and make it work for it to become viable again. As they have already lost their market share, they would have to go above and beyond to regain that market share back. Just look at Renderman for instance. Plus keeping up with all the other improvements that have been done in those intervening years like make sure it works with substance, plus a viable nodal shading network which it didn't really have back then. I'm not sure if people would take it back in the end, but I doubt even higher they would request for it to come back with out being able to get their hands wet with it. Chicken before the egg scenario. There are a lot more render engines out there now a days than a decade ago, that have larger fan followings. However this is my own opinion, my Mental Ray books are still collecting dust, but Good Luck Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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