I am rendering a high resolution letter with smooth edges. So smooth that the letter "S" has 107k polys. I started the model with polys, converted to subd's so that I could add partial creases, then converted back to polys so that mental ray could render the letter. The environment is very simple consisting of only a nurbs sphere with a lambert shader for reflections that has a ramp mapped to incandescence (3 horizontal gradient bands). When I render at 1080, I get faceting in my reflections. I tried softening normals which didn't help, but I did put a smooth on the poly mesh which gave me the crazy high poly count, but at video res, it did help the faceted reflections a bit. The surface renders beautifully if I didn't have transparency with reflections. Just to add a little more description, imagine a what should be a nice swirly reflection but instead you get a reflection swirly that is made up of 5 or 6 harshly angled segments.
On a different note, has anyone else had problems with mental ray and keyframing visiblity? I have had both these anomalies in the past, but now I am determined to resolve these issues. In the current anim, I was keyframing visibility so the the first object would be rendered and at frame 100, it would be invisible and the second letter would be rendered, however, mental ray ignored visibility...
any thoughts or advice is greatly appreciated!