3ds Max 2018 Replaces Mental Ray with Arnold!?

[doug_bowker_3D]

Autodesk Renderer Announcement

Summary: Max 2018 will ship with Arnold built in, instead of Mental Ray. As a "bonus", network rendering using said new renderer will now cost extra.

Tell me: how is this in any way an "upgrade" or benefit to a customer? Who is going to pay for retraining all of us who've never used Arnold before, not to mention the huge interruption in professional workflow this represents!

I've been an Autodesk customer for a long time, ever since r2.5, and I have to say this is the biggest customer slap in the face I've ever seen by the company. It's as if our subscriptions are like us paying for the privilege of getting abused! And of course they just calming roll this out as if it will be no problem whatsoever...

• No transition period is offered other than just staying with Max 2017.
• No support of conversion of scenes that use Mental Ray; that's all on the user to spend the time to figure out how to do it. 
• A major feature of many users pipeline is removed with the only option being to pay another $1k per year- just to keep using the software that was free!

And yes, I also do own VRay as well, which is entirely beside the point. I have over 15 years worth of models, scenes and projects that all use Mental Ray. I have dozens of materials and Materials Libraries built up, again over at least 15 years and the company is taking the stand that all this will be a minor inconvenience? Anyone who's been professionally working in a particular 3D workflow for any length of time is not going to just lightly open up a complex scene or project (some with thousands of objects and dozens of carefully tweaked lights) and just start "converting" things. You must be kidding me! So work that took days, maybe weeks either needs to be re-done all over again or now we pay an extra grand just to get us back to where we were before?  Thanks guys!

[timd1971]

too bad NVidia link doesn't work to download.

https://www.youtube.com/redirect?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nvidia.com%2Fobject%2Fdownload-mental-ray.html&v...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7UVEDQ3u3M

EDIT:

https://forum.nvidia-arc.com/showthread.php?15999-Important-Fix-for-Mental-Ray-for-3ds-Max-2018

https://s3.amazonaws.com/arcdownload/mentalray/release/Mental-Ray-3ds-Max-2018-WIN-1.0.1.zip

[doug_bowker_3D]

The free version of Mental Ray for Max 2018 works pretty much as it did for Max 2017 (with a few exceptions listed below). It had been available until November 20th but I guess that's gone now too. It's too bad that they no longer even offer that!

If you PM me, I'll set up a shared DropBox folder with the download package that they were offering up until a few days ago. 

A few notes:

1. For me, if I need to use Max 2018 with MR, I set it up there and then export it back to Max 2017- if anything so I can use network rendering. For the most part I am sticking to Max 2017 for MR related projects for now. If there a special feature in Max 2018 (like the liquids) I'll just separate out those elements and render them in VRAY.
2. This version is Workstation only, and will not support network rendering including Backburner.
3. At least in one instance, when I tried to render to RebusFarm, even though I was actually rendering with VRAY for the job, my file still got flagged as "containing an incompatible plugin". I ended up having to go to a fair amount of trouble to get things fixed, though it may have been the fact that the earlier version of MR Max 2018 had gotten an update, and maybe that was cause of the bug. So just full disclosure. If you end up with some really annoying issue, after the install, you'll have my sympathy, but I can't offer tech support. 😉

[timd1971]

even though MR is "dead"...  is iRay still alive or going to be?

https://www.irayplugins.com/iray-for-3ds-max/news/launch-stage-FAQ

[doug_bowker_3D]

See my post below if you're still looking for the files. I can just re-upload what they had available in a DropBox folder if you want them.

[timd1971]

Thank you, but I am not seeing it?

[timd1971]

Nevermind, I got your email! Thank you!!! ; )

[william.chenoweth]

I agree with your sentiment.. I'm living a nightmare now, after being booted off of 3ds Max 2015 from a 3-year license cut off. Now the scenes I'd worked on for 2 years are completely and utterly trash.. I've been trying to relight, and relearn things with Arnold.. but I'm darn near close to just jumping ship and getting Cinema 4d..