You might recall the one small step for Blender which was the incorporation of MentalRay support in a build by RCRuiz. Well now comes the giant leap of Blender2MentalRay 0.0.3.
From RCRuiz:
- An addition of an interface in the lights to control the shadowmaps.
- A new interface for baking and reusing of GI, FG and shadowmaps.
- A general Cleaning in the costume area to be able to put costume material and initial information.
- I fix multiple bugs in lamps and materials.
This is the file (.rar) with all the adapted pynodes.
Graphicall admin ZanQdo has been checking it out: "It comes with a special pynode that handles all included shaders in mental ray... it's just a mater of adding the custom node located in Add/Script and then choosing the mental ray shader from the list [which are from the adapted pynode rar]."
You too can check out this mind-blowing build at graphicall (it's just the exe so you'll need a folder with all the libs with pthreadGC2.dll (not pthreadVC2.dll). You can also take a look at the BA thread of RCRuiz's test using mentalray and pynodes to see how big mentalray nodes can get (also shown in inset)!
*Please note that this build is not an official release nor is this functionality in the CVS for the upcoming Blender 2.43 release. However, if you are a MentalRay user or are looking to be, this might be the build of choice!
16 Comments
I don't own mental ray, but man, that looks like a brilliant way of intergrating a renderer's materials into Blender. Hope to see others do the same.
//Mathias
DAAAaaaaAAng. Thats one hell of a node.
Nice.. and your non-open source apps generally include this feature as a major selling point. Blenders open-ended design, flexibility and the resourcefulness of its users are pushing the features of blender up and up every week! Great work! Look forward to playing with this one.
¡¡¡MEGANODE!!!
Do you know how long it took alias to integrate mental ray into Maya?!?!?
Wow. It looks pretty complete. If i had a standalone copy of mentalRay i might be tempted to use it.
Now why didn't anyone else think of this before? I mean what a great way to integrate renderers! oh, and there is a book somewhere that gives you a demo of Mental Ray, anyone know of it?
This seems a bit impractical. I mean... kudos on the efforts but that has to be the worst interface possible. The only way it could be worse would be if the contents of that node were scattered around the screen randomly like confetti. Anyway.. I hope it works well.
So does anyone know what the price of a single license is? the great Autodesk seems to hide it so well...
Duositex I don't know what you mean by that? what you see is just a new shader in Mental Ray 3.5 called Architectural-Design (integrated by custom nodes), the other shaders aren't that big :-) and nodes are just a part of the interface, render settings, lights and other stuff are controlled in their respective places more similar to yafray integration
Is there a source file for this? I would love to see how you implemented this and see if I can do the same for renderman/aqsis. This should be the templaye on howto intergrate a renderer in blender.
hey, thats one freakin big node. Wish I had mental ray.
(I don't no where else to post this) Today I read in the pcworld mag and saw a mention of blender! " you may also like to try blender at http://www.blender.org although its interface is not particularly kind to the beginner"
yay haha.
Its HHHHHUUUUGE like said above !MEGANODE! But it works..
Have you seen Tons work lately ? Its great but its messy as hell. And so far no real progress on a node workflow speed up wich is a while from now of course.
very nice release, i will try use it om my future 3d projects.
thanks
http://www.arquiteturadigital.com
BIG NODE RCRuiz, and big release.
congratulations
Thats great, too bad i havent got a standalone MR license. Got MR on XSI FND, but there is some stuff i would love to use blender for.
if you have a 64 bit linux I think you can download a mentalray standalnoe demo from Softimage website:
http://www.softimage.com/downloads/XSI6_EssAdv/default.aspx
but I didn't try