The new Mental Ray GI NEXT is pretty amazing: it can compete with the brute force unbiased Arnold's approach (that uses Montecarlo's algorithms) maintaining a lot of details, especially regarding tiny contact shadows. I've put just few textures, keeping the environment pretty flat to make us clearly see and compare noise and overall render quality.īetween the images above I didn't see any significant difference in terms of quality, the render seems a little sharper in Arnold Render, but the noise is also more prominent (especially in the direct shadows areas). The scene consists of 3M vertices, plain polygons, 3 diffuse bounces, no caustics, SSS, dispersion effects, hair or fur.
Same scenario for both render engines: Sun & Sky + area light.
I used an average pc: CPU I7 2600k 4.4GHz (to give you and idea of its compute power the Cinebench R15 Score is 758), 32GB DDR3, Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB, SSD 500gb. The first render is always Arnold (mtoa 1.4.2.0), the second is Mental Ray (2017.12, 3.14.4.6). Obviously the rendered images are not identical because any render engine interprets the lights and materials in its own way. Whenever possible I used the same Maya light primitives, I've also put any light source in the same position and with the same intensity. I tried to make the overall scene and light setup very simple, just to reduce the number of factors that could enter in the game.
These are the main attractives of Arnold Render: is simple and fast to learn, is photo realistic with no efforts, is memory efficient and can handle extreme complex assets without problems (did you saw Gravity?!), alShaders (a powerful toolset for artists). On 4 January 2017, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized Fajardo with a Scientific and Engineering award (Academy plaque) for "the creative vision and original implementation of the Arnold Render engine." Arnold was the primary render engine on dozens of films from Monster House and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to Pacific Rim and Gravity. Originally co-developed with Sony Pictures Imageworks and now their main render engine, Arnold is used at over 300 studios worldwide including ILM, Framestore, MPC, The Mill and Digic Pictures. Arnold is an advanced Monte Carlo ray tracing render engine built for the demands of feature-length animation and visual effects.
Anyway a big part of the render computing is still CPU based, I hope to see some big steps toward the full GPU utilization.Īrnold is an unbiased (so it's similar to Maxwell, Octane, Cycles), physically based, ray tracing 3D rendering application created by the company Solid Angle. With this new GI model, Mental Ray can use the power of CUDA to compute the indirect/global illumination on GPU. We saw concrete results just in 2015 when the new GI NEXT was implemented. Mental Images was bought in December 2007 by NVIDIA, trying to bring some freshness to the old Mental Ray.
In 2003 Mental Images was awarded an Academy Award for their contributions to the mental ray rendering software for motion pictures. It has been used by the industry and professionals for over 28 years (the first release have been built in 1989 by Mental Images), Mental Ray has become a standard for photo realistic rendering across the film, visual effects, and design industries (Hulk, The Matrix Reloaded & Revolutions, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, The Day After Tomorrow and Poseidon are just few examples of products made using Mental Ray). Mental Ray is a feature-rich, programmable, biased ray-tracing render engine. What are the main characteristics and differences between the two?
You have to download it directly from the official website, it will no longer be included in the Autodesk installer.
Regarding Mental Ray, you can use it for free of charge for use on a single machine, with the same restrictions for Arnold (no network render and animations). If the system does not find valid licenses, however, batch renders will display a watermark.Īrnold for Maya is one of the most widely used rendering engines in the CG Industry, which often constituted a valid and simple alternative to the old Mental Ray for Maya. The Price start at $1,220 for a single license, with a range of discounts for the bundle. Right now Arnold is free when used directly via Maya interface on a single workstation and limited to still frames (so no batch render for animations). The integration will follow the one already carried out last year for Maya 2017.
After the NVIDIA anticipations about the departure of Mental Ray and iray rendering as integrated render engines, Autodesk confirms official rumors that wanted Arnold to be the new 3ds Max 2018 integrated render engine.