I’m a bit concerned at the moment about the speed of rendering in Mental Ray.

Can anyone reccommend a third party render package that’ll speed up ray tracing compared to Mental Ray?

I’ve been sitting for ages watching Mental Ray crawling through renders while using only 15% of system resources. I’ve been told that the minimal use of system resources is actually a good thing because it shows that the software is well optimised. This may be so, & I’m keen to learn how that is the case, but the bottom line is that the renders are taking too long for my liking.

Any suggestions?

That is very strange because when I use mr it makes full use of all of my system resources; keep in mind that I’m a 3ds Max user & not XSI.  Either way, mr always flat lines all of my processors.

Chris Robinson
http://www.supercoonstudios.com (Under Development)
3ds Max 2011
Dell Precision 690, Intel Xeon Dual Quads @ 2.66 GHz, Dual NVIDIA Quadro FX4500s, 12 GB RAM, Windonws 7 x64

Thanks for the response SuperCoon.

To me, it makes sense that it should use total system resources when it’s rendering. I’m curious as to whether it’s an issue with ICE, Mental Ray or maybe a problem in my system.

I’ll have to look further into this.

Mental ray probably is the problem, since it fails on adding and calculating stacking geometry like particles instances and lots of geometries in scene.

There arent really other alternatives except 3delight wich is a beast for rendering those kind of stuff, and Arnold.

I wish at mental images would seriously take into consideration to work on mr speed, sampling, displacement, mblur, dof. Those things are the same as 10 years ago while other engines went far ahead, like Vray for example. Wish MR had Vray sampling method..

Back to topic, i dont think your problem lies in Softimage, since its full multithreaded and never had any issue with this, its probably mental ray for sure.

Post some scene or image so we can help you tweak some settings, i’m sure Mr might be speed up a bit.

good luck

Thanks for the offer of assistance.

Attached is a close up of an early test on the particle effects causing the grief. As you can see, there’s plenty of ray tracing in there, so I can’t expect a quick render, but it’d be nice if it were happening with more than 15% of resources being used.

I’m also hoping that if I can get my head around making polygonizer & Lagoa Fluid Shaper working on it, that those two things may help.

	Attachment

We’re stuck with mental ray for ICE. You could try the V-Ray for XSI beta if you are doing interiors or architecture. It’s twice as fast even for basic ray tracing.

How do you get hold of the vray beta? I would love to test it

Ras Mor 03 November 2010 02:41 PM

How do you get hold of the vray beta? I would love to test it

me too!

http://djordjejovanovic.com/blog/

http://www.chaosgroup.com

mail at Vlado if you wanna join the beta.

Holeycow,

I’m interested in your experience as I am having a similar experience with Lagoa simulations. When running the sim it only uses approx 20% of my system resource and in some cases it doesn’t use all my threads!

I carry out a similar sim using the older SPH system and my resouces are 70-90% utilised.

Would you be able to check if your experience could actually be Lagoa that is slowing you down and not MR?

Regards,

Alan