Maya Mental Ray Flicker Free

I've been documenting about how to handle Vray flicker free and completely forgot about the process that helped me do flicker free work in MentalRay. It is quite sad given how much time I invested and how confident I got.

Well, the industry has moved on and seem to have built on that whole concept with write ups and all so I'll just tap on that to relearn. Flicker free, perfect for architecture visualization renders and now with the subset node, to handle the dynamic stuff. Awesome

Maya MR Flicker Free

A chunck of really helpful info from the above link so I can get my renders going quick

"To create a Frozen FG map, define a map first in the Final Gather File field (an extension name doesn't matter, though I use .fgmap), then enable the Preview Animation mode in the Preview section of the Options tab of the Render Settings. Preview Animation will render out your scene but won't save files in this case. You'll ONLY be calculating the FG map for your main rendering camera. To set the renderer to render only the FG pass, under the Features tab, set the Render Mode to Final Gathering Only. Image sampling (anti-aliasing and such) settings don't matter and will have no effect, since FG is being rendered only. Then under the Common tab, set the By frame attribute to a setting such as 10, or 5, there usually isn't a need to render every frame for the FG map, unless the camera view is covering a massive change per frame. Keep in mind that the pixel resolution of the image does matter, so you'll need to set that to your target output pixel resolution, also under the Common tab. Now render the current frame and Mental Ray will calculate the FG data for the length of the animation. Remember to switch Rebuild to Freeze and unhide any objects (such as your characters/creatures) you didn't want in the frozen FG solution when you're ready to render again. Here's a quick explanation on the Rebuild modes in Final Gather:

Rebuild On: Overwrites the FG map on every render, and with each frame advance at render-time.
Rebuild Off: Appends (adds) FG points to the map, as needed, without overwriting it.
Rebuild Freeze: Reads from the FG map, doesn't overwrite nor append anything to it.

MR AO pass respecting opacity maps

I found this thing I drew up for someone and thought I better junk it here incase I forget too.

To Convert All Mia_x materials to DeeX_Mia_materials

string $malistes2[] = `ls -type "mia_material" -type "mia_material_x" -type "mia_material_x_passes" `;
  string $montruc;
  for ($montruc in $malistes2 )
  {
  AEdoMiShaderConversion $montruc deeX_mia_material _deex;
  }

Mib_FG_Occlusion

Note to self
For Occlusion Pass -

Mib_fg_occlusion works with cutout opacity.

Maya2010 *i've heard rumors of this problem being solved the standard way on Maya2011

Backburner not firing all cylinders!? The humanity!

So here is a link where they mentioned that backburner doesn't use all cores. Dear wen hao, note to self, use these bloody command line codes.

I quote the wise people on CGtalk

"I have gotten in the habit of manually setting the memory and thread usage flags in the job setting for MR jobs with Backburner:

-rt
Specify the number of rendering threads.

-art
Enable this option so that Maya automatically calculates the number of threads that should be used to best take advantage of the CPUs (or cores) on your workstation.

-mem
Soft limit for the memory used by mental ray (in MB). A soft limit implies that mental ray may actually use more memory than indicated.

-aml
Enable this option so that Maya dynamically calculates the memory limit prior to the start of rendering. This feature can be enabled at all times to obtain better performance."

CGTalk

Backburner is not using all cores!

Another point to note while using Backburner. Assign small jobs and if the job fails take note as it tends to render over previous files or jam up the render farm. Furthermore, renderlayers are DANGEROUS so keep it to one render layer per file. And save out a brand new file for each render and then dump those later on.

Backburner 2008.01

Mia_RoundCorners

Been a big fan of Mental Ray nodes. Especially those that speed up render time and save me polygons. I haven't tried this in production as I am always worried what it would do to my mattes for compositing.

Mental note - please do test how the mattes work as I can see this used in my productions pretty often.

Mia_RoundCorners - Add bevels without adding more geometry