Thursday, August 20, 2009

Mental Ray Progressive Rendering in Maya 2010

Maya 2010 comes pakaged with Mental Ray 3.7.53
This version of Mental Ray have a really cool new feature called the Progressive Rendering.
This feature is not yet implemented in Maya 2010, but fortunatly for us Autodesk designed the string options.

With the string options, you can add any Mental Ray options and set it's value then Maya will pass this information to Mental Ray enabling the Mental ray feature! This is great because Maya users don't have to wait for Autodesk to implement new Mental Ray features.

Of course using the string options are not very user friendly ... that's why I have create this script to add the string options to enable Mental Ray's Progressive Rendering.

You can download the script here.


Install the script an execute it ...
This little window will appear, enable the Progressive Rendering and start a render or an IPR!
Adjust any of the options from this window instead of having to edit string options manually.

The Progressive Rendering works like a charm in IPR, tweak your lights and material faster than before!

Enjoy!

13 comments:

  1. Thanks, Berger, for creating this script.
    The link to the script seems broken to me too.

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  2. Whats this progressive rendering ? Is this anything to do with Iray ?

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  3. Here is the full adress for the download http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/rendering/mental_ray/k-progressive-rendering-5913.html

    As for progressive rendering and Iray ... Progressive rendering may derive from the Iray development, I am not sure.

    Progressive rendering is available in many other 3d software like Modo or Vray RT for 3dsmax.

    It basically render the scene in many passes, each pass increasing the quality of the image every time.

    The difference between this and regular IPR is that progressive render gives feedback faster... instead of calculating the entire tile to full quality, it renders it at 10% than 20%, 30%, etc etc...

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  4. WOW! 0_0 this is what I've dreamed about!
    the script works great.
    Thanks!

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  5. Thanks Sylvain,
    Its great to see Mental Ray getting into progressive rendering, I was getting a bit jealous or Vray RT and all the other renderers.
    Fingers crossed 3dsmax 2011 has it.

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  6. how to do that in softimage?

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  7. I don't think it is possible to do this in Softimage. Maya have the string options that allow the user to add mental ray options from the UI so that the translator pass this information to Mental Ray. I will look if it is possible to hack some Softimage file to enable this, but I don't have high hopes.

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  8. Love this!

    One spesky thing though, and believe me I think I've searched everywhere, is that I get this warning when I open the render view window

    "// Warning: File not found: progressiveRenderingOn.bmp"

    I'm on Mac OS X Maya 2010 - Any thoughts, doesn't effect performance in any way though. It just bugs I can't trouble shoot it!

    shaneholloman@gmail.com

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  9. I am not sure if .bmp are supported on OSX. You might want to try to conver the bmp in XPm using fcheck. Open the bmp in fcheck and do save as xpm

    Then edit the renderWindowPanel.mel and do a find and replace of progressiveRenderingOn.bmp for progressiveRenderingOn.xpm and progressiveRenderingOff.bmp to progressiveRenderingOff.xpm

    Let me know how it goes

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  10. Excellent :) ! Thank you, very cool.
    I had the same issue as Shane, "// Warning: File not found: progressiveRenderingOn.bmp" It looks like .bmp is support on OSX. I'm wondering where the icon files for Maya are kept on the Mac (different than on Windows). Even though the little icon does not show, your script works perfect :D !

    I'm also on a Mac OS X (10.6.4), with Maya 2010.

    Has progressive rendering become a default option in Maya 2011?

    Thanks again!

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  11. Have you planned a version for maya 2011

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  12. now it is working in maya 2011 :/ strange but cool with the new ibl light mode.

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