NVidia is to EOL Mental Ray. In a newsletter announcing the decision they say that from November 20th 2017 “NVIDIA will no longer offer new subscriptions to the Mental Ray plugins for Maya and 3ds Max, as well as Mental Ray standalone. Current customers who have purchased licenses from NVIDIA will continue to receive support through our Advanced Rendering Forum for the remainder of their subscription terms.”
Nvidia attributes the reason for retiring the seminal renderer as a change in focus. Under the question “Why is Mental Ray being discontinued” they will that “NVidia will focus on bringing GPU accelerated ray tracing technology to every rendering product out there”, listing OptiX, MDL, IndeX, and IRay for CAD as technologies that will benefit from further investment.
You can read the announcement in full on NVidia’s website.
hmm…
AFAIK, unlike iray, mental ray supports deep image rendering.
Will NVIDIA dropout from the VFX industry?
Can you name any relevant VFX studio that has used Mental Ray in past 2-3 years? 🙂 Mental Ray/nVidia has dropped out of the VFX industry many years ago already 🙂 Nothing will change.
What is a relevant studio?
Only relevant studios are considered for features?
Only relevant studios pay for licensing?
Who is paying more licenses those relevant studios or the thousands of small studios and freelancers?
Cheers.
Mental Ray had an userbase because it was free with 3ds Max. So almost no one directly paid for the licence. After MR was cut out of 3ds Max, nVidia was selling MR licences directly, and I would be very surprised if the licences they sold could be counted in thousands, or even hundreds. Dozens at most 😉
Also, you apparently did not get the point. “n” was asking about Mental Ray dropping out of VFX industry. And yes, VFX industry is mainly defined by relevant studios. Even small studios can be considered relevant, and I can’t even think of any small relevant studio, that would be crazy enough to use Mental Ray in recent 2-3 years. By relevant I meant any studio that does any VFX work at a reasonable quality level.
Just show me at least 2 or 3 such studios. Studios that do reasonably good VFX work and have used Mental Ray to render it in past 2-3 years 🙂
Ok, you are assuming that VFX is the main 3d industry… arch viz and engineering viz are much bigger industries, while they are less visible, there are a lot more productions, and in this industry the render engine quality is not the priority, it should be good enough but also fast enough, and many studios here used mental Ray just because it was included, and at the same time, many studios had a small renderfarm just because it was one of the most important 3ds max selling points, mental Ray features were defined by Autodesk in 3dsmax and Maya, why do you think you were able to render volumes natively in Softimage and Maya but you were unable to do so in 3dsMax?
Of course the licenses sold by Nvidia should have been near to zero… do they think we are stupid with their abusive rental model?, do you think iRay licenses are being sold by millions? IRay is probably profitable because it’s included in many packages (substance painter e.g.)
And also… why should those studios reasonably good VFX? Studios with a visually high quality work should be ignored? They pay the same as any other studio, they have no discount because their job is not the prettiest one.
I think you are focusing too much in the industry you think is the bigger one, and in the quality you like, but the reality is that there are many studios with many different pipelines with different qualities.
The biggest problem I see with this EOL is what should we do with our legacy work, I this case we are safe, we have our max and Maya 2017 licenses and that’s it, we can recover our work and translate to Blender, and we won’t go further with Autodesk in any sense, but others that have legacy work and are in rental… they won’t be able to recover anything in a few time… and that is not good, and yes, there are time when you have to recover a 5 year old project to update it, and having to translate it to a different engine, or not being able to recover all the materials is a big problem.
So.. you are saying “quality is not the priority” for “arch viz and engineering viz”?
MR was not good nor fast in ths ages. It was cheap for sure. But, I guess most user chose to use good and fast renderer than cheap renderer.
I´m not saying that, I´m saying that for many companies visual quality is not their main concern, they need something that is good enough, they don´t need an Arnold render, they would like to have it, but the render time for them is prohibitive, so they tend to go to something decent, mental ray was way faster than Arnold or Cycles or even iRay in many cases, specially if you knew how to configure it, and the thing was not that it was cheap, but that it was included in max with unlimited render nodes.
Quality is important in many cases, but not in ALL cases, that is the reality, there are projects that just need to visualize something in NPR for example, can you render an NPR with Arnold nowadays? and is it fast?
Cheers.
We are still taking about N’s original post, where he was talking just about VFX industry. Every time there is a gap in your argument, you just steer it in a different direction.
Also, obviously, by “reasonably good VFX” I meant “at least reasonably good VFX”, to weed out potential examples of some obscure fresh graduate who just made a website with his first few tests and called himself a studio. I just honestly wanted to see any example of a VFX studio (Yes, VFX, because N was talking about VFX industry) that does good, or at least reasonable VFX work, and still uses MR, or at least has used it in past 2-3 years.
What? In this post there is a mention from Nvidia specifically about CAD:
“NVidia will focus on bringing GPU accelerated ray tracing technology to every rendering product out there”, listing OptiX, MDL, IndeX, and IRay for CAD as technologies that will benefit from further investment.”
So… or I did not understood you or you are wrong.
Too bad for this renderer it had so much potential at some point. Was to be expected it’s been dead for the past 6 years at least, plus cant expect more under the wing of Autodesk and Nvidia, two ruthless companies when it comes to business decisions.
finally a Good news for the CG world!
why?
tell me Who have MR in his heart?
Nobody
Still, good news?
Hard to find the logic, perhaps is just me.
you will thank them when you you ll use another renderer, arnold for example. your productivity will go up suddenly
Personally I don’t use MR since college, still, less players in the field.
the EOL is not bad news for me personally, but as a member of the CGI community it certainly is, It was indeed bad news when Max stopped having unlimited nodes for a production ready renderer.
It’s also bad news the way things went for users, they are never considered and this is a trend we’re seeing more and more, the simple fact that this happened again is indeed very bad news.
Good news implies thet there’s a benefit to come from this for the users, If a person was not using it then there’s no benefit, if a person was, there’s certianly no benefit, bad or good it was another player in the field (at $95 for Nvidia carrying workstations).
I think as a community is much better to see all the players as an ecosystem, they balance the prices and move innovation forward, moreover, they are used by colleges whos spent countless hours (and a lot of money) developing a pipeline, to not consider them is just isolationist and counterproductive, as a community we are stronger banded together to have empathy is only a good thing and makes it more likely for you to have the community behind you when they come for your software.
If Mental Ray had been kept up to date and was still competitive with the other render engines out there, I would fully agree. Unfortunately MR had been left behind as a free, but fairly outdated render for many years. It WAS a great renderer back in the day, but now I can’t really remember the last proper update it got. That is too bad, and I wish it was a competitive render engine still!
To me, the issue with the current situation is some workplaces still hang on to MR due to it being free. Perhaps not seeing the big picture that better render engines might provide better quality in a shorter amount of time. That again often means holding the artists back as well, which in turn means they might face bigger problems finding a new job when the time comes.
One of the MR developers posted that he’s working on options to complete his vision of MR so don’t start the party early. The irrelevance and slow death of MR might still continue.
Good news. Mental Ray didn’t change through so many years. EOL is good news for mental ray
News at most hehehe
😉
Most people here will probably shrug this off or laugh at this piece of news. But Mental Ray is an important piece of CG history, and its good to acknowledge that I think.
It was the first feature-quality renderer able to push Renderman off its throne, due to the (then) impressive raytraced renders in films like The Matrix and La Cite Des Enfants Perdus. Mental Ray had a huge user base at some point (no doubt due to their link with Autodesk), but when change happens in this business – users are quick to follow. And it can be ruthless for the companies affected.
So, cheers to Mental Images and the innovations they provided!
I like that.
I think Mentalray suffered from a disease that affects this area and is not talked about: TD job protection and consulting work.
I remember how Autodesk and Avid( Softimage) in mid 2000’s never pushed shaders that provided much better quality and could give Vray a real competition. It was people like CTRL and other that could provide essential capabilities by hacks but you had to dig them.
Only much latter, to be read= too late! Mentalimages wake up and would. But by then Vray was long distant.
Indeed, it served me well in it’s early days. I remember doing my first mirrorball based lighting scenes with the ‘hidden’ production shaders.. it was pure magic!
Well said! And let’s not forget the role of MR in the CAD industry, e.g. for direct raytracing of NURBS surfaces. Not sure there are other production renderers that do this?
Numenus RenderGin did this for real time industrial product viz. Autodesk bought them back in 2011 so who knows how, or if, that IP is incorporated into any current products.
True that,
Not so long ago Mental ray still had superior shader workflow, to this day some of it’s shaders still shine. Vray still has a hard time doing proper skin scattering until they started implementing Arnold tech just a year ago.
So it’s too bad to see this piece of history fade away, we can always round up the usual suspects, but i may give it a pass this time as the core was really ancient and it may have needed a complete overhaul, at which stage might as well just buy Arnold which they did, it’s one business decision that may have been sound with this software. But still too bad.
so, next in line is Maya,
it’s going to be fun
I am too tired to search in this portal for the garbage we have all written in the past about MentalRay: how bad, how outdated, how slow, unsupported and how simply ugly it is. Just go back and read how great we were in kicking and spitting on it.
This eulogies and empatic statements now about “pity, he was a great man, rest in peace” are disgusting. Too late.
PS. yes, MR was in last years an orphan. It was unsupported and complicated. It is clear NVidia bought MR just to get fingers on Iray.
hahahaha perfect!
When people say that the existence of MR was important as it kept up competition I wonder how in hell that does? Last time I was involved in some job MR was used in is 7 years ago and since Arnold’s explosive appearance I overall didn’t hear of any jobs done in it. It was a zombie for a long time, nothing else does the action of Nvidia say.
I still use mental ray all the time in arch viz and will miss it. I will continue to support it at MrMaterials and actually working on the site after moving to a new system. One can still use 3DS Max 2016 and mental ray competitively and make a living. I am sad and will miss it.
Then, what was all the cry for removing the MR from 3dsMax?
It seemed like MR was the core of everyone’s workflow.
Well. It was in many studios and many situations, but the problem again is missunderstood, the problem was not the removal of mental Ray but the removal of any right of network rendering with the max mainstream render engine.
We quited max, maya and Autodesk in general pretty successfully and we are very happy with the exchange, in fact it has been an improvement in many situations, so… if someone does not want to understand and prefer be hostage of Autodesk… you are welcome to do so people, but keep in mind, your effort and time, your learning, all this and your spent money in licenses is no more an investment, now you are ensuring Autodesk income, even if you don’t have any income, if you want to make use of that knowledge or if you want to make use of any tool.
Now the dead of mental Ray was something announced, it was clear that Nvidia wanted to milk that cow, and when they realized that cow was dead and there was no milking option of something that hasn’t seen a real update in years, then they killed it and they are selling now that they are going to focus the effort in iRay with CUDA, ignoring OpenCL so you can render just with their GPU (I use only Nvidia… but, while is perfectly fine, I don’t like this movement)
I’m glad we don’t depend on CUDA for render, we are able to use OpenCL, CUDA and the CPU, all at the same time, with Cycles… pretty awesome 🙂
Cheers!
If MR was useless outdated renderer as many users mentioned, what’s the point of having unlimited render lic?
It was handy to have as an option.
I worked at a couple of places that hadn’t invested in other engines, or were slow to do it and the legacy projects were mental ray.
Taking it away and replacing it with Arnold (with the added cost per render node) meant that any legacy files would either have to be loaded onto old installs of Max (and again due to Autodesk’s f**ked up policy you needed to be on subscription to actually do this) or the whole scenes would have to be converted to Arnold or V-Ray or Redshift etc.
It’s similar to the stunt they pulled with Reactor, and this time around happened when they were announcing jacking up prices, which added to people feeling like they were being taken for a ride.
Additionally to this, the removal of MR also removed the option to bake ambient occlusion and orthographic reflections. None of the included renderers can do this, leaving Max (probably) the only major tool that lacks these render-to-texture options.
Not to surprised, I always wanted Mental Ray to make a come back, there was hope for a while with Irradiance particles and unified rendering but it never eventuated. MasterZaps work on Arch/Design shader was brilliant and MrSky, MrSun will be missed. I liked all the CTRL Shaders from Max and Francesca specially in XSI, Sebastian did some good work with the TR2 Shaders. There was looks of good stuff going on, just amazed that Mental Images or Nvidia couldn’t push the development further.
So what will happen with ROMBO TOOLS ? That was looking interesting.
Definitely sad news to me, been in the industry for more than a decade now and still my smoothest workflow contains Mental Ray 3.13! So many pipeline designs based on Zaps techniques problem solving with awesome production shaders… I’m gonna miss these in the near future 🙂
But the next pipeline investment for me would definitely not involve any Autodesk and/or Nvidia software. We learned that lesson the hard way.
Still my hat off to the Mental Images for making the joy of my past decade in CG happen 🙂
All Hail ZAP!
Mental R.I.P.
Hello to everyone,
There are people who call mentalray a bad render tool. hahaha ahhaha
All our work is using this engine. And bad news for us. Autodesk can not understand this stupid attitude. I think the problem was marketing. Vray never lost time and was full of tuorial videos. Mental ray did not do that. Whatever you wanted to say, it was always faster. Many people are shit because they do not use it. Because they do not have the knowledge. You can look at http://www.santralmimarlik.com ma. I think they should continue, it is not difficult to develop two products for Nvidia.