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NVidia ARC's iray developers write a iray's technical blog.

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The architecture of mental ray

Figure 1 shows the standard mental ray architecture. Figure 1 standard mental ray architecture. F1: Application scene file: Application proper file. For example, .max (3dsmax), .ma or .mb (Maya), .scn (XSI). F2: .mi file: mental ray scene description file. If the DCC software has mental ray plugin, or integrates mental ray, they usually support .mi file export. (A2) 1. Application: DCC (Digital contents creation) software. For example, Maya, 3DSMax, XSI, CAD program, and so on. 2. mental ray core: mental ray core program. There are library version mental ray and stand alone mental ray. The library version mental ray is usually invoked by a DCC application via translator module of the application. A translator is a module of a DCC application which translate the DCC application's internal data structure to the mental ray data structure. The stand alone version mental ray reads a .mi file and performs the rendering. If you have only mental ray core, mental ray does not work. mental...
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iray 1: iray in standalone mental ray

* As far as I know, we can only run mental images' iray in NVidia's RealityServer. I hope Autodesk 3dsmax/maya/xsi supports iray soon. mental images (a subsidiary company of NVidia) demonstrated iray renderer in GDC's keynote and SIGGRAPH ASIA 2009. GDC NVidia iray demo (YouTube) mental images iray page mental ray or some other renderers can simulate indirect illumination in some extent, but the methods final gather or photon map are quite rough approximation. They have no guarantee to converge to the correct answer. Also there are many renderer parameters for performance optimisation. These parameters heavily depends on the scene. It is difficult to achieve high quality and faster rendering. These methods are anyway time consuming, therefore, we sometimes put invisible light sources by hand, that simulates indirect lights. This iray is a brute force path tracer and there is no renderer parameter, but nowadays computer has not enough power to compute the light tran...
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iray 4: iray in standalone mental ray

As an example in here, I create one teapot in 3dsmax and assign a mia_material (Arch&Design). Since 3dsmax exports an mi file with 3dsmax shader dependency, mental ray standalone could have a problem to render that mi file. mental ray standalone usually doesn't have 3dsmax shaders. The main advantage of the standalone mental ray is parallel rendering on a render farm. I couldn't tell the legal license of the 3dsmax shaders. For the safe side, if we have no dependency to the 3dsmax shaders, it shouldn't have a problem. (Or you can also install 3dsmax to all the render farm machine, though it doesn't make much sense.) If I just render the mi file from the 3dsmax without modifying, I see the following error. --- > ray -x on -v 5 00teapot_ex00.mi ... LINK 0.0  error  191007: cannot load 3dsmaxhair.dll, The specified module could not be found. ... LINK 0.0  error  191007: cannot load mayabase.dll, The specified module could not be found. ... LINK 0.0...
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