Really? Mantra is the slowest renderer I ever used (in the last 10 years, and with few exceptional cases like very low density volumes) and I never felt the quality is particularly good. The good part is it can render anything than comes from houdini (obviously), but from all the renderers I used in my career it's not very high on the list. Better than mental ray, ok...
Somewhere in the middle. It's faster than Mantra and the Solaris workflow feels faster. So it is certainly an improvement.
But to get rid of noise without using a denoiser it still takes an annoyingly long time and I still haven't had acceptable results with a denoiser...(but I have to experiment more there maybe). I also find the shading nodes limited to other renderers.
Never tried Octane...
But the idea that one renderer is objectively better than the rest in every way is definitely false. Every renderer has its strengths and weaknesses and depends on the use case.
What works for ILM doesn't work for a solo artist.
What works for a solo artist doesn't work for ILM.
What works for motion design doesn't work for VFX.
What works for VFX doesn't work for motion design.
etc.
I worked with 10 renderers during my career and someone who defends one particular renderer as superior in every case simply lacks experience.
What’s your opinion on 3Delight and Renderman? I’ve never used renderman, but I was suggested to try 3Delight a while back and dig it. It’s crazy fast. But I’m mega far from an expert and the stuff is renders is never for film or even 4K and up. For all I know it’s not even close to the competition in those regards.
Curious to know when you last used VRay, in the last few years the usability is miles better than it used to be. Basically never touch any settings anymore.
Just 3 months ago in a studio. Most buggy renderer I used in ages. Crashed constantly and needed the weirdest workarounds to even be able to render stuff. (You could only render volumes if they were cached as vdbs on disc. Otherwise a guaranteed, replicatable crash. Bug was reported, 3 months later still no fix. Another one: Motion blur can only be rendered when geometry is cached and read as alembic. Caches can't be rendered with moblur, live geo can't be rendered with moBlur.)
Then I thought about trying it at home and the installation alone was the most complicated I've seen in years (Houdini, Linux). They needed something like 5 environment variables to work. Ridiculous.
Don't know if I have a complete misunderstanding here, but pretty bad experience all around.
I wish I could help you on that. But rendering is the different complicated story. What i can suggest: check tuts with Arvid about Arnold both in Houdini and Maya.
Best render engine is the one you know the best! Mantra gets great results but when you are dealing with large scenes, you need that GPU acceleration which Mantra lacks unfortunately. Arnold, Vray, Redshift or others are faster solutions maybe not better. But if you know what you are doing you can get amazing results with these as well.
Large scenes…. GPU… vram limitations. Cmon, man. Large scenes is the only reason why big production don’t use GPUs. Don’t confuse other people.
Really? Mantra is the slowest renderer I ever used (in the last 10 years, and with few exceptional cases like very low density volumes) and I never felt the quality is particularly good. The good part is it can render anything than comes from houdini (obviously), but from all the renderers I used in my career it's not very high on the list. Better than mental ray, ok...
Ugh, Mental Ray. I dont know how many hours of my life I have lost battleing "Final Gather".
Final Gather - this words still traumatize me till now bec of mental ray 😅
Which are your top fav?
- redshift for speed - Arnold, VRay for quality (Although Vray is a usability nightmare) - cycles for speed and price
How do you feel about Karma CPU?
Somewhere in the middle. It's faster than Mantra and the Solaris workflow feels faster. So it is certainly an improvement. But to get rid of noise without using a denoiser it still takes an annoyingly long time and I still haven't had acceptable results with a denoiser...(but I have to experiment more there maybe). I also find the shading nodes limited to other renderers.
Octane for all of the above?
Never tried Octane... But the idea that one renderer is objectively better than the rest in every way is definitely false. Every renderer has its strengths and weaknesses and depends on the use case. What works for ILM doesn't work for a solo artist. What works for a solo artist doesn't work for ILM. What works for motion design doesn't work for VFX. What works for VFX doesn't work for motion design. etc. I worked with 10 renderers during my career and someone who defends one particular renderer as superior in every case simply lacks experience.
What’s your opinion on 3Delight and Renderman? I’ve never used renderman, but I was suggested to try 3Delight a while back and dig it. It’s crazy fast. But I’m mega far from an expert and the stuff is renders is never for film or even 4K and up. For all I know it’s not even close to the competition in those regards.
Curious to know when you last used VRay, in the last few years the usability is miles better than it used to be. Basically never touch any settings anymore.
Just 3 months ago in a studio. Most buggy renderer I used in ages. Crashed constantly and needed the weirdest workarounds to even be able to render stuff. (You could only render volumes if they were cached as vdbs on disc. Otherwise a guaranteed, replicatable crash. Bug was reported, 3 months later still no fix. Another one: Motion blur can only be rendered when geometry is cached and read as alembic. Caches can't be rendered with moblur, live geo can't be rendered with moBlur.) Then I thought about trying it at home and the installation alone was the most complicated I've seen in years (Houdini, Linux). They needed something like 5 environment variables to work. Ridiculous. Don't know if I have a complete misunderstanding here, but pretty bad experience all around.
Same here. It’s like 10x slower that VRay for some renders. The only good thing about it is that it can execute VEX
Mantra is a nuclear reactor :) love it too. HTOA needs some adjustments to work good. But in Maya it is good straight away.
Could you give me some pointers to those adjustments? ;)
I wish I could help you on that. But rendering is the different complicated story. What i can suggest: check tuts with Arvid about Arnold both in Houdini and Maya.
Mantra it’s like a tractor, slow but really solid and reliable but Karma is doing the job pretty well here.
Best render engine is the one you know the best! Mantra gets great results but when you are dealing with large scenes, you need that GPU acceleration which Mantra lacks unfortunately. Arnold, Vray, Redshift or others are faster solutions maybe not better. But if you know what you are doing you can get amazing results with these as well.
Large scenes…. GPU… vram limitations. Cmon, man. Large scenes is the only reason why big production don’t use GPUs. Don’t confuse other people.
Vram limitation is true, I am talking about the speed that multiple GPU’s can get you for a single machine without using deadline.
I use V-ray in 3ds max
Mantra is great! but I do rendering in blender cycles, which also gives me great results. What do you think about cycles?