Mantra rendering engines

Explains the different rendering methods of mantra.

Overview

Mantra lets you choose different methods for rendering the scene. Each has trade-offs of speed, quality, and correctness. You choose the rendering engine using the Rendering engine parameter on the Render tab of the mantra output driver node.

Choices

Micropolygon Rendering

A standard micropolygon renderer is much faster than raytracing.

Pixel Samples are used to control motion blur and depth of field.
Min Ray Samples and Max Ray Samples are used for variance antialiasing.

Ray Tracing

A raytracing renderer is more realistic but slower than micropolygon rendering.

Pixel Samples are used to control motion blur and depth of field.
The shaders are run at all sample points. For each shader, Min Ray Samples are taken if no “samples” are provided.

Physically Based Rendering

A raytracing PBR renderer.

Pixel samples are used for antialiasing everything.

See the Physically Based Rendering help for more information.

Micropolygon Physically Based Rendering

A micropolygon PBR renderer creates much less noise in motion blur than the raytracing PBR renderer but is much slower.

Micropolygon physically based rendering creates less noise than physically based rendering at the default quality levels. However, if you increase the sampling quality of the (raytracing) physically based rendering engine enough to eliminate noise, the result is more accurate than the similar micropolygon physically based rendering image.
One of the features of micropolygon rendering is that shading is dragged with the object as it moves. This has the desirable side effect of blurring out noise from the low sampling rate.
Pixel Samples are used to control motion blur and depth of field.
Min Ray Samples are used to improve the global illumination quality.

Note	The performance relationship between micropolygons and raytracing is reversed for the PBR renderers: the raytracing PBR renderer is much faster than the micropolygon PBR renderer.

See the Physically Based Rendering help for more information.