Maya Station

mental ray Satellite 2013 Windows not working on machines

We have had users report that mental ray satellite 2013 is not running on some Windows 7 machines.  Users have reported errors of failed connection to the satellite machine or even running the service will fail with errors.

This seems to be occurying on machines that have missing Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package which contains needed libraries to run some of our prodcts correctly. 

We provide the installer (vc redist_x64.exe) with our discs and our downloads. The downloaded package generally extracts to "C:\Autodesk" directory. After doing the extraction browse to the Maya directory in "C:\Autodesk" you will find the 3rd Party installer in "\3rdParty\x64\VCRedist\2010SP1\vc redist_x64.exe"

After the package gets installed everything should be working.

More information about Microsoft's Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package can be found here.

I just wanted to thank our users for making us aware of this issue.

Cheers!

Nelson

 

Creating simple fog in Maya with mental ray

A very short video showing users how to create a simple fog effect with a spolight. Using the mental ray transmat and parti volume nodes are the building blocks needed to get you on your way to creating volumetric fog effect.

Hope you enjoy.

 

Virtual Memory: a performance issue often forgotten

Are you working with large scenes or with big textures? Are you experiencing software crashes?

Possible scenario: You are working on a computer with Windows 7 and 6GB of RAM. When you load the scene, the memory usage is somewhere around 5GB. If you try to start a batch-render process Maya may crash.

Final Gather fails to render when map rebuild is set to off

There is an issue issue in Maya 2012 hf2 when the Map Visualizer is enabled and final gather map is set to off.  

As a workaround we can force the legacy finalgather map containers to be used.  

1. In the command line run "select miDefaultOptions;"

2. The attribute editor will load some mental ray options.  Scroll down and expand the "String Options" category and click "Add New Item"

3. Scroll down to the bottom of the list to see the new empty options.  Enter the following.

Name: finalgather legacy
Value: True
type:Boolean

Afterwards you should be able to set your scene as you normally would and the maps should work with final gather rebuilt off when the map visualizer is enabled..

Thanks to Ash for his contribution.

Cheers!

 

Is there a maximum resolution for images rendered with mental ray for Maya ?

I've been looking into this recently, and a little research suggests that the size of the frame buffer is an important factor to consider when rendering a high resolution image using mental ray for Maya.

While there are no explicit limits for the resolution parameter, it's important to understand how mental ray caches its frame buffers.

Cannot open renderer description file "-mrRenderer.xml"

It's not very frequent that this terminal rendering error comes into the support or happens at all but it does happen and it will leave a few people scratching there heads.

Well, no need to worry at all.  This error is very minor and it will show up because a user has somehow overlooked at what command they are sending.  It really only takes one character to be out of place.

Below is the example we usually see.

Render -r -mr file.ma

If you look carefully,  there is a extra hyphen being used.  To fix this just remove the hyphen just before "mr".  The "-r" is the only valid flag in the above example and the render will fail because what follows is not a valid string to go with the flag.

So the correct command would be.

Render -r mr file.ma

small user error but does get missed by some folks.

Custom Color Pass Use Transparency new Feature

In the new Custom Color Pass we can use Transparency new Feature to be added in the render pass
This feature works nicely when the Shader is plugged into color. but what if you want a different color than original one.

The problem is that the writeToColorBuffer shader expects its color input to be pre-multiplied (effect of transparency already applied), the workaround is to use a multiply node to multiply the custom color by the outMatteOpacity of the main shader. 

   

The “use Transparency” option on the render pass does not actually apply the transparency to the surface color, it just determines whether objects behind the surface are visible in the case where the surface is transparent.

 

Thanks to Justin Novosad for his feedback

 

Mental ray texture bake and multithreading

This is repeated question, regarding can mental ray utilize multithreading while texture baking.
The answer is if you bake one texture map then mental ray will use only one CPU. 
However if you are using multiple maps then mental ray can utilize the additional CPU's automatically.

Frame buffer name tokens

In order to take advantage of this option, you need to have the following
Some render passes
File format set to Open EXR

Now you can enable the Automatic to custom

Light emission from IBL node increase render time in Maya 2011

Compared to previous versions of Maya the function of using Light Emission from the IBL node will dramatically increase render time.
This matter has been logged as BUG and currently under investigation by the development team.
As a workaround you can use under the "Light Emission" tab of the IBL shape, keep the "Quality U" and "Quality V" settings no higher than 7.  This is because the bug kicks in only when there is more than 56 IBL samples.

If this produces too poor quality results (grainy images), you can compensate by boosting the Sample Level under Render Settings->Quality->Anti-Aliasing Quality->Raytrace/Scanline Quality.

Workaround 2

1. select the miDefaultOptions node. 
2. In the attribute editor, open the "String Options" section.
3. Hit the "Add New Item" button.
4. Scroll to the bottom of the String Options section to find the new added
blank item.
5. Fill in the new item as follows:
 - Name: environment lighting mode
 - Value: light
 - Type: string
6. When doing preview renders in the render view, to get "smooth" results
without too many samples, set the value to "approximate" instead of "light"

Thanks to Justin Novosad for his feedback