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Mental Ray rendering settings

7 REPLIES 7
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Message 1 of 8
PaalGustavWiderberg9222
999 Views, 7 Replies

Mental Ray rendering settings

Hi all.

 

I'm trying to render a sequence consisting of some letters with a self-illumintating glossy plastic material.

 

The object consists of two objects, one with high gloss plastic with a slight transparency, another one within it, slightly inset, with a high value self-illuminating material.

 

I look-developed it using still mode rendering, but when I started to render as a sequence I noticed it looked different than expected. The difference is in the indirect diffuse pass, which is very noisy in the animated sequence. It also has some very pronounced highlights which are incorrect.

 

What am I doing wrong?

 

Best regards, Pål, Norway.

 

 

7 REPLIES 7
Message 2 of 8

If the anim renders different to the still, it's possibly your FG settings. Looking at the FG settings, you have "Project FG points from along camera path" enabled along with "One file per frame", that's probably something to do with it.

The best setup is down to the nature of the anim. If you have moving objects or moving light sources (including SI materials) then don't project from camera path.

Message 3 of 8

Thank you for your quick reply.

 

There are no moving objects (there will be at a later stage though), just a camera that tracks towards and then along the text.

 

I created an FG cache map and a GI photon map of the entire sequence beforehand, which is set up to be read. So the animation doesn't flicker, but who cares when it looks so bad as it does as of now.

 

But 3ds Max must turn something off when you switch between single and active/frame range, since the renders come out so differently.

 

I'd like to have the quality of the image rendered as a still when I render as a sequence, and I would also like to know why the differ so much?

 

Message 4 of 8

OK, if only the camera moves, then Project from along camera path can be used, but with that setting you only need "Single file only" in the mode. Since you are only doing the one FG frame, you can boost the precision setting for it.

If you later animate the glowing text, or other things, you will want different settings.

Message 5 of 8
Midge_S
in reply to: samab

Also, in your Global Illumination settings there's a "Noise Filtering (Speckle Reduction)" setting.

By default it's set to "Standard" but when you're illuminating the scene with only self-illuminating materials set it to "None".

This way you'll get way better looking lighting results from it.

 

M.

Message 6 of 8
hartmann
in reply to: Midge_S

Hi

 

Selfillumination and FG is allways a big Problem. Here can help Importonen. look here: http://www.infinity-vision.de/blog/blog_importon

 

mfg

hot chip

Message 7 of 8

Thanks for all the help guys. I turned the speckle reduction to none and upped the rays per point in FG, and so far so good. I could still up the quality in the highlights, the frames render at 4 mins per frame and I have roughly 300, so I can afford longer render times.

 

The result so far is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OFzwB72T0w&feature=youtu.be

 

 

 

Message 8 of 8

(this is done without the importon plugin as it rendered pretty well without, but thanks for the tip, I'll keep it in mind).

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