Bubbaloo wrote:Scheduled to be released to subscription customers of 3dsMax, is Iray, supposedly by the end of the month. I can't wait to put it through it's paces, and bust out some comparison renders with Maxwell.
Hi Bubbaloo,
It was a great shame that the powers that be at Autodesk again failed to integrate a decent piece of software into their 2011 release. That's what happens if you outsource your money makers to a chinese shop. They lost all knowledge of their own core ever since the developers all walked away. It's completely hopeless internally.
The guys from mental images are steaming with frustration as they know how to do it. Gary Yost the current MI VP in charge of the US and lotss of other active team members until Max 5 or 6 now work for MI so they were adamant it would be easy. However on every engineer Autodesk employs five Q&A guys to get the buck out on a simple integration job. They were afraid to give the go ahead as they already lost control on some other 'plug in' (read third party bought) renderers. There is no engineer who understands their radiosity engine. I worked to get that fixed and finally they had to admit that they were clueless.
Anyway you will like Iray a lot. Beautiful renders just like MR as it converges. It's not as fast as f.i. Octane but that's not because of the quality per se but also because it was done in a hurry so not optimized yet and had to be a hybrid for political reasons causing unneeded overhead. If Autodesk releases it with the option to disable the CPU, better do so. It's 0,2% faster with the CPU enabled as well and this was with a high end i7 together with a single low end 200$ GTX460. Better choose for GPU only as it leaves your CPU free to do other lowly but needed jobs. Better workflow.
In my system it's only three times as fast but I hardly threw money at an optimum GPU system. For 200$ more I would have had twice the speed etc. I only use in on my non production play system like I do with all other renderers I test.
However once you have used the brush accelerator you will never go back. That defeats everything. You just use the brush (you control the diameter) to an area where you expect problems or where you are interested in the real look of your material and it concentrates all that power there. I can't remember exact but it's something like 200 times as fast as the already fast normal GPU solution. So within seconds you have done the work of hours and hours of rendering and just know how it will look. Just use that brush on all potential points, paint a bit with it and your model looks great. Then disable it again and iRay will just go on rendering with your already done spots already clear. Leave it cooking for an hour or so and you have a perfect render, but you knew that after 30 seconds max. Really revolutionary for the whole workflow!
I know guys with four C20xx's and you won't believe your eyes then. It's like sitting on Zeta's renderfarm.
Max.