Thanks. This was Jasons data:

Pixel Samples: 7x7 (up to 10x10 if the scene really needed it)
- Min/Max Ray Samples: 1/9 – sometimes 2/9
- Noise Level: 0.08 (this seemed good enough to us … less than film grain)
- Reflect/Diffuse Limits: 2, 2
- Color Space: Gamma 2.2
- Color Limit: 4 (your 1 is clamping way too hard)
- Photons: 2m photons for a huge room. Yours is 7m! I'm sure 1m is fine for this space. Ratio was 2.5.

Photons don't apply here as things will be moving too quick and you'll get the smudgy flickers

He's using rt-pbr (i think) and so 7x7= 49 x 2min and 49 x 9max is his shading samples per pixel: 98 to 441

I used on my last round:
6min 12max with a shading dicing of 6…. so my numbers for shading per pixel are: 216 to 432

so not entirely out of the same realm.

Any tips on motion factor settings?

Ok, so lower the dicing and use what to compensate… min rate? But you recommend setting that to 1…. I'm getting pretty splotchy blobs with low dicing from my environment light.

I could use some help dialing in render settings.

Assume im working on somthing like a scratched up and dented silver car.

I'm getting ok results with mp-pbr
7x7 pixel samples
4-16 ray shading samples
ray variance noise 0.02
8 shading quality (dicing)
motion factor of 0.75
env light at quality 1
high angle spec/reflection quality at 1

Anything jump out at you as being way off base? I don't really know what im doing here so I may have arrived at a poor solution.

Also the formula for motion factor in the docs is mildly confusing, nowhere does it have an input for what number you type in the motion factor box to get a sense of how much 0.75 lowers the dicing… I tried 5 and it was a brutal shading drop….

Any insight is appriciated.

Michael Blackbourn
The Embassy VFX

Using mantra in this case would be more about not wanting to move all the data around than anything else. A pragmatic pipeline decision more than an A better than B render thing.

We have a job coming up that we need to wreck enough stuff that I'm reluctant to push stuff back into Softimage for rendering. Usually for us Houdini is dust/smoke and we comp it into MR renders.

As far as the flower petals go it's all modelling other than the veins which are textures.

And from my tests I'm not scared to render our standard robots/cars in Mantra. Seems more than capable in most areas and more capable than MR in mblur/displacement/dof world.

sampled DOF.

and some roses…

PBR and some SSS.


these were all in the 5-8min range

Evaluating mantra as a rendering solution for an upcoming gig. Just wanted to make sure it wasen't too painful for us to retrain some guys doing lighting in houdini. This didn't take me too long to dail in. Nice renderer.

I used a car as a prettier shader ball for testing, helps illustrate problems with hilight compression on curved surfaces very well… mantra was a champ with sampling that stuff. I was coming at this with a bunch of lightwave, modo and mental ray experience.

Cars have most of the smaller surfaces set to a black plastic (lenses inside the headlight housings, tires, interior…) but the paint, glass, and rims look pretty much right.

mantra surface and ray trace pbr

ITs reflective in mine. I think it's the normals not smoothing the reflection across the bevel. Steve, try a facet sop on the cubes set to 40 degrees.

Symek: Thanks for the politeness in your response. But I'm a big boy and I can take it. I guess I'm approaching this from a commercial perspective more than hard-core film rendering. Commercials tend to be a beast as their quality requirements have gotten very high and yet their production timelines have gotten shorter. Combine that with even more work being done in post as an additional day on set is so much more expensive than ‘just fixing it later’. Ease of setup can really be a factor when you have no time.

But I wasn't trying to go for a speed comparison, not even a quality one really. I recorded *what* I setup, so that I could see the same setup in Houdini. I don't really care if its dog slow or way smoother, I would just like to be able to get the same images, with the same types of features in Houdini as in modo. It looks like Steve is close already.

Other than isolating the glass object with a fine shading rate, and adding some more samples to the blurry reflection one this scene would animate relatively well. But again, I don't really care about the speed comparison part, I just want to be able to make the same images.

And I agree, the likelyhood of setting up 5 toroidcubes each with a different material on a white table lit by the standard kitchen HDR for a production shot is remote. I haven't run across such a thing yet, not even back on Andromeda. However it would have made a ‘very creative’ alien device.

Steve: How are you lighting that? HDR driven GI? Or Ambient Occlusion?

in 9.5 134 64bit it worked better than it does now. Old scenes load up with a lot more garbage triangles on the items in the latest version. It's actually quite hard using a default cube and shatter to get clean cuts without garbage tris.

Steps:
create shelf box
set it to polygon mesh
add a shatter

note the garbage polys
change the seed amount to try and get rid of the garbage triangles…
from 0-10 only 8 and 10 are clean, the rest all have problems. I don't think it used to be this bad.

Wow. Can I get an RFE on that one? A ‘what its really playing at’ feedback info line?

thats for the cache all suggestion. Is there a way to display an FPS readout of what its playing back? I loaded some 720p EXR's in and even cached it didnt feel full speed.

I'm dropping a cube into a default particle fluid puddle and it's super ‘bouncy’. Not the result I would expect.

clicking the clock button and setting fps to 24 works, but it always stutters on some of the loops and then runs through real quick then it's ok again for a bit.

Is there a setting somewhere that makes mplay behave? Anyone else have problems with realtime playback?

win xp64
amd x2 4400
4gm ram

loading a 720p .jpg sequence of 96 frames.

9mb Flash movie:

http://www.elementvfx.com/WebDemo/modo_shading/modo_shading.html [elementvfx.com]

I end up with 5 materials
clay (diffuse -no spec)
chrome (no diffuse 90% reflection, no fresnel)
blurrymetal (no diffuse 60% reflection, no fresnel, blurry reflections)
glass (5% facing, 100% edge, physically accurate fresnel, IOR 1.54, blur-green beer's-law based absorption)
plastic (diffuse mixed with 5% facing 100% edge reflection, physical fresnel, energy conserving with helmholtz reciprocity)

Irradiance Cached GI on
Direct light with soft shadow
HDR environment for the GI and reflections
8 reflection/ 8 refraction recursions

46 second rendertime 640x480 dual core, decent AA.



I would love to see this replicated in houdini from someone that knows what they are doing.

Why is that? The potential for abuse too high?

Also, can you write out .obj out of the HD version?

I might make a quick video in modo, showing setting up a few objects, a light. simple surfacing (clay, plastic, glass, chrome, blurry reflective metal), and some GI. Then maybe one of you Houdini wizards could somewhat replicate it in Houdini. That would give people like me a bit of a rosetta stone intro vid so we might feel more comfortable with getting renders going in Houdini…

You were right!

I'm totally digging Houdini. I do wish its was faster at a few things…. Cloth, Rendering…