Hi all, I am trying to figure a way to set up a system for rendering with mental ray, and my budget is really, really tight. I am working with Maya 5.0.1 and mental ray 3.2.6. My current system is: AMD XP 2400 1GB DDR ram, 80 GB IDE hard, Quadro FX 1000.
I usually use Maya Hardware Render for most of my work and can get away with it on most parts, my render time with Hardware is really great for example my last scene only took 10min to render with the Quadro and quality was ok. But for some parts I need to use the photon tracing option in Mental ray, that same scene took me something like 6 hours to render. I was wondering if it is possible to get away with one CPU maybe changing my system to a 3.2 P4 or is dual a must, or would network rendering be more cost effective? Maybe getting another AMD system with a normal graphics card and using it as a slave to my current system. Thanks for your input.
are there different rendering tricks you can use to get your current times down to more reasonable levels and still get the image quality your client demands?
I know in the old school days, back when we had 40mhz processors we would always try to get just the right blend of trickery and bells and whisltes to hit the sweet spot in rendering.
Obviously adding additional systems to your mix is going to help with your number crunching tasks. You can't really go wrong with more boxes. It just comes back to expense. Only you know what the right budget is for you at this point in the game.
Thanks, I guess one way off going around the Number crunch is creating a ligthmap, something like baking light structure into the Texture files, so I could just use the data to Hardware render things, more like the way a game is done. Well that is quite a complex way of doing things, because then I would have to create a huge database of Texture files for each geometry and then bake the photon data to them. But it should bring down the render time a lot.
I guess for that I need a faster and smarter brain, and few more liters of coffee.
40mhz!!! when did you start working in 3D what software did you use? I would really like to know.
Well, when the DOS based 3D Studio was in release 3 (before Max) a 66 MHz Pentium was one of the fastest PC based systems there was. I can remember a buddy of mine paying almost $3600 for a Pentium 66 with a 17" MAG monitor and 2MB graphics card.
this was in the early 1990's on a Macintosh. Actually i remember my dad getting a Radius Rocket upgrade card for our old Mac II. I was in digital nirvana.
I was using Infini-D and RayDream (they later merged many years later and became Carrara now) at the time and couldn't get over the speed increase that the add in card provided.
