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

i like that , esp. the ‘white couple’ …


.cheers

looks good! How are your render times?

and some roses…

PBR and some SSS.


these were all in the 5-8min range

with real dof or post?

sampled DOF.

sweet. very pretty.

the second frame of the roses is really beautiful !
it is good to see mantra used to produce such details , beside the usual dust'n'smoke'n'fire …

–

im really curious to see the level of detail of their geometry …
any wireframe screenshot ? what app is used to model those ?





.cheers

very nice looking renders. the roses stand out.
also, u got me curious. how are you and the embassy guys
using houdini? i thought it was mostly for vfx work, but i see
ur pushing mantra all the way. r u planning to move towards
a more houdini centric pipe?

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.

interesting. it's true that mantra feels more robust than mray,
the only drawback to me is how convoluted things are with building shaders
in houdini vs the xsi render tree.
though i'm curious as to why you would go with mantra
and not arnold for heavy raytracing/gi work.
i'm sure you guys have used it at least for testing purposes,
since you use xsi almost exclusively for rigging/animation.
if nda's allow for at least a personal opinion…

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.