NVidia ARC has posted information on the new GI GPU-accelerated engine prototype that comes in Mental Ray 3.12, the version that ships with Max 2015. The developers have made available a script for making it easier to enable the GI GPU mode and are looking for users’ feedback. More on the Mental Ray developers’ blog.
Mental Ray’s GPU-accelerated GI engine prototype
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works only on Max2015 ?
Other than modo and lightwave’s internal renderer’sbeing CPU only, Mental Ray is probably THE slowest to adopt GPU rendering and Nvidia OWN Mental Images which is all rather surreal don’t you think! Anyhow nice to see Mental Ray starting to get GPU boost…long long long overdue if you ask me.
Yep, 2015 only – mr 3.12
@steve – i don’t know if mr is that late for the game, but you forget that iray, which was pretty much the first, is a part of it.
well iray sucks more or less as most things don’t work that are native to 3ds max..it’s really Sloooooo….ooo…ooow compared to other gpu renderers in my opinion and mental ray also sucks as it’s the bundled renderer with 3ds max and it’s also the least compatible with 3ds max materials… yeh you could say i’m not feeling the LOVE from mental images much if at all…hence me now rendering in modo for most things and also adding blender and cycles renderer recently.
still it’s a freeby so there you go.
Sorry but even with this GPU acceleration those render times seem CRAZY high.
iRay does not suck! It’s a very capable renderer, with a really good material. I use it for still product shots, and it’s perfect for that.
If you are rendering in mental ray, you should be using the A&D materials. I’ve not heard of somebody using the Max materials for a long time. Saying that mental ray sucks because it’s incompatible with “3ds max materials” is crazy!
Shame about the recent Cycles news. I hope they can keep improving it. It was just starting to get good.
put it this way regards mental ray and iray…They both support the least amount of features for a renderer compared to, vray, final render, mosquito renderer, octane etc…and mental ray was the CHOICE of autodesk to be the default renderer bundled with the sale of 3dsmax.
truly crap support and development compared to other render solutions.
yes i get the mental ray materials…for mental ray but still it’s taken years and years and still it’s miles behind other options.
autodesk should have bought mental images when it was up for sale..or better still bought another renderer.
Or, shudder at the thought, DEVELOPED one.
>>truly crap support and development compared to other render solutions.
I’ve had great support in the past, direct from the programmers on the Nvidia forum. I take your point though, development does seem to be very slow.
Those images look soooo dated too. You’d think they’d find some better scenes for this sort of announcement. Pretty awful.
MR lost the rendering battle a long time ago. Just waiting on the EOF statement.
It’ll never be EOF/EOL statement. If that happened, what render would AD put on Max and Maya?
I think they prefer to not spend any more money and leave MR there.
@cashley – Feel free to contact any of the admins on the ARC forum – they will gladly accept scene “donations” for both testing and publicity.
I have pushed Mental Ray out of my workflow as much as possible, and this after only implementing it 3 years ago. I will probably be hanging on to the alpha of Corona and Max 2014 for quite some time.
Can’t speak for MR 3.12 and Max 2015 speed and ease of use, but to beat the Corona alpha on Max 2014 would have to be a drastic difference from where Mental Ray is now, I don’t think it is possible but I am willing to try it out next spring in case I am wrong.