Part two of the sprites series of videos is an in depth look at rendering sprites in both MentalRay and 3Delight.

Well its official. Mental ray sucks. I thought I could achieve the same results using raytracing but outputting something worthwhile posting has been troublesome to say the least. See the results for yourself. The first swf is mental ray and the second is 3delight. Mental ray and ray tracing was so slow that to even get that poor quality rendered out in time (without cranking the settings) i even had to reduce the particle count. The 3delight on the other hand with the deep shadows enabled me to blur the shadows with no penalty since they are depth map and to leave expensive ray tracing out of the calculations.

Mental Ray

3delight

Techniques discussed in these videos are:

1. Setting up per particles attributes and setting up the scene
2. Creating a texture and sprite shader in Maya
3. Trouble Shooting sprites in Maya for mental ray and 3delight.
   Here is the text file with all the steps for trouble shooting sprites.
4. Setting up rendering dust in 3delight including deep shadows, and motion blur.

Fluid Sprites Rendering in MentalRay and 3delight

Fluid Sprites Rendering for 3delight continued

The example scenes are here:

Rendering in Mental Ray and 3delight zipped (maya 2008)

Fluid sprite animation example :

http://www.modernmayhem.com/fluidsprites.html

Rendering the road dust layer from the tornado project (coming up next)

http://www.modernmayhem.com/tornadodustrendering.html