Mental Ray-RAC 2009 questions

[cliff collins]

Anyone have the real answers?

1. As Accurender is being replaced by Mental Ray, how will animation tools work?
2. If there are new animation tools, is there any way to batch render/use several machines to render frames of animations?

We would prefer not to move to Max for animation--keep it all in Revit. But it sounds like
this may not be possible?

Guess we'll see when it comes out in April?

Cheers......

[dpasa]

I don't think there will be any new animation capabilities... Actually I am almost certain that Revit's Mental Ray will be a kind of subset of Max's Mental Ray because
1. No 64bit, no multiprocessor, no renderfarms of course
2. No bitmaps in views

I don't know how the material editor will work.....


Anyway, no matter what we don't get with this release, the change from AR to MR is great!

[jeffh]

Anyone have the real answers?

1. As Accurender is being replaced by Mental Ray, how will animation tools work?

No changes to the animation tools other than the rendering engine used in the creation of them.

2. If there are new animation tools, is there any way to batch render/use several machines to render frames of animations?

No batch render/render farm will be part of Revit 2009. You would have to export to another application for this functionality.

[cliff collins]

Jeff,

Check out Scott Davis' reply:

Revit's Mental Ray can use up to 4 cores in one machine.

(edit: for more clarification: a satellite can be another machine for bucket rendering. One single image processed by up to 8 satellites. Backburner allows a ton of individual images to be rendered on an "unlimited" number of machines to produce animations or other large amounts of individual stills. one machine renders frame 1 to 10, another does 11 to 20, etc.)
__________________
Scott Davis
Revit Technical Specialist
Autodesk, Inc.

Sorry-did not know how to use the "excerpt" thing.......

Cliff

[jeffh]

Right I have seen Scotts reply in the other thread. The mental ray engine in Revit 209 wil use up to 4 cores on one machine. Backburner and satalite rendering refered to is when using 3dS Max. I believe. This is not possible from Revit.

[dpasa]

Mental Ray with 4 cores is really fast, that is good news!!!

[cliff collins]

Jeff/Scott:

Please clarify--we are trying to evaluate workflow process and plan for future
vizualization. We would like to fully utilize Revit 2009 Mental Ray w/
"node" / "satellite" Backburner capability. From what Scott said, this appears
to be possible.

Cliff

[jeffh]

Jeff/Scott:

Please clarify--we are trying to evaluate workflow process and plan for future
vizualization. We would like to fully utilize Revit 2009 Mental Ray w/
"node" / "satellite" Backburner capability. From what Scott said, this appears
to be possible.

Cliff

Satellite rendering and Backburner are NOT able to be utilized in Revit 2009. The functionality is possible in 3ds Max.

[cliff collins]

Thanks, Jeff.

Not what we wanted to hear, but we will wait to see what we can do w/ (4) cores
per computer.

It sure would be nice if in the future we could use Backburner w/ Revit/Mental Ray.
Lots of Revit users out there would also benefit--probably without much affect on Max user base, as architects and movie animators are in somewhat separate worlds/economies.

That said, we are also considering moving to Max and Backburner as well.

Cliff

[tomnewsom]

Can't remember if you can choose start and end points for walkthrough renders, but you could set one machine to render frames 1-300 and another to do frames 301 to 600, for example.