is the MR development team hyper active?

[royter]

Just checked the nvidia MR site, the latest news goes back to 2010. Why aren't you guys super active like Chaos Group, showing up in Siggraph, in every major CG happening, in magazines, in websites, basically every where? Are you putting your effort on another product? will this trend continue for the next year?
I know that technical guts like bart and steeve have been always present for user support, but I have been a cgtalk member for 8 years, and I never saw so many people switching from MR to Vray, I keep seeing those Vray threads growing by the number, and key elements in the industry have been focusing more on Vray too, like Gnomon school/workshop, and digital tutors, I just feel that the general trend is starting to shift, it's just obvious.

[bnrayner]

What kind of answer are you looking for here?

Mental ray is a very capable renderer that is still widely used. I'm sure you've noticed improvements such as unified sampling as well as lots of bug fixes. Nvidia's main interest is in selling GPUs not CPUs so you probably won't see much official mental ray publicity out of them.

[Remydrh]

Most simply:

--Chaosgroup actively markets Vray because it is their product to consumers. nVidia sells mental ray to Autodesk and direct customers, not end-users. So you don't see marketing for it designed to reach the end-user.

At SIGGRAPH the nVidia booth will discuss all of their products. That's a LOT of products. How many does Chaosgroup need to focus on? Just four really and two of those are not their main brand image (PD Player and Phoenix) nVidia's brand image is GPU solutions as bnrayner points out.

So what does this mean? Well, let's back up a little and look at the larger business picture.

The relationship between nVidia and consumers isn't always a direct one like their GPUs. And I find it interesting that even though this has been explained ad nauseum, people don't seem to understand that ARC is not marketing to you or end users. They market to OEMs/integrators. Then you as the end-user deal directly with the integrators. The marketing for mental ray, for example, is built into the Maya marketing. So you see marketing for "Maya" but in that list for each release are things about rendering. . aka: mental ray. Does Boeing market to you? No. But airlines do. They use the features of the plane they just bought to try and sell you a flight. "More legroom!" The legroom is a Boeing thing, not the airline's engineering but they ordered it for you.

As a Vray customer, you are a direct customer, because you pay them on top of your original investment for Max/Maya, whatever. This is why the relationship and marketing are different.

(Sidenote: http://www.google.com/patents/US6529193 nVidia currently owns the methods related to deterministic sampling/rendering. So Unified Sampling is born of research and solutions like you'll see in a lot of nVidia papers and products. This puts them in a good place to capitalize on that knowledge. In fact, nVidia loves to license this technology to make sales on their hardware solutions. This licensing is done through OEMs as described above. So in all likelihood. . .maybe you're using or seeing others use ARC research in something else right now. . . . Vray RT with CUDA and Vray with metaSL for example. nVidia's business position is different than mental images was.)

As for CGTalk, I'll be honest: the advice given to users on how to use mental ray is consistently horrific. The general solution is: turn everything up! Then it's "slow". Well of course it is now. But you'll notice when comparisons are done (for raytracing) similar results are often seen for correctly setup (and usually trivial) scenes. And the vast majority of what I see on CGTalk are trivial scenes. Do you think there's a reason you don't hear about Sony, ILM, Weta, The Mill, Luma, Buf, MPC, etc talking about Vray? Because while Vray is good at a lot of things, it's not as developer friendly or flexible as mental ray or other solutions. To say nothing of the fact that I still see people use "Blinn" in mental ray. While installing Vray you see "Vray Material" and it's a no-brainer to use it instead of Blinn.

This is why you see Vray all over CGTalk. . .these users do not need a programmable solution where new tools are created for individual projects. And I think if you look around you'll see quite a few people surprised at what they can do with mental ray (like the forests thread on CGTalk). And while they are surprised, I am not. I keep up to date with features and controls. So I think the perception there is a big problem.

What do you think helps alter this perception? Now we're back to the first part: marketing.

That and every time someone runs into a problem someone hops into a mental ray thread: "Use [insert renderer here]!" Does this help the user learn how to use mental ray? No. It encourages them to abandon it at the first sign of trouble by implying they are doomed. They don't stick with it to learn how good it can be. Instead they pull out the credit card (or other. . methods) and stop using Blinn at the cost of a license of something else. (Just an example I see happen.) How many solutions on CGTalk are: "Use the mia_material"? LOTS of them. And I know you are very aware of that solution so I'm sure that may seem like a silly problem, lots of users don't know any better. They freak out. . .buy something else.

I learned mental ray when there were no other alternatives other than Renderman. And I was poor(er). So I stuck with it. My reward is the ability to use mental ray effectively and quickly. I save money by doing so (I don't need plug-ins) and I can stay employed by helping others with their problems in rendering because I took the time to really understand the process. I can either transfer this knowledge to other renderers or help the (surprisingly large) number of people/places using mental ray. My time in here helps me identify places for improvement in the mental ray core and I work with people to solve these issues and report bugs. When I talk to ARC through a direct customer/employer I don't talk about how perfect everything is, we talk about our user requests and improvements. And lots of times things found on the forums and in production. But you don't see this because you do not work for a direct customer. As Bart has mentioned, things with materials and lighting are being worked on with these requests in mind.

I wish you could see it and it's frustrating for me to see all this going on. And you COULD see it when Autodesk integrates it. In fact, some of these things being announced on Twitter are exactly because ARC wants you to know. Looks at the shader fixes being made available on the Maya forum. The iray shaders in the iray forum. The users are being given direct access more and more to fixes and changes that ARC has control over. Is this not what has been desired for some time?

You're not being ignored, but like I pointed out, there's a way to do this. How? Be helpful. Post scenes. Prepare files with bugs when you can narrow it down. Apply workarounds and state your desired solution. We've all looked at your light mapping problems and I am having a hard time isolating the main problem in the scene because part of the problem is inside Maya. This means you really need Autodesk's help on this. Does your company have Autodesk support? If they do, and it's an integrated feature like this one, you can get direct help. I have done this several times with help from Ashraf Aiad at Autodesk. We share a bug report and it gets fixed.

Go to Autodesk for integrated improvements and solutions. This relationship is improving but posting threads like this sour it because they see it. This is a public forum connected to a professional business that connects to others. By keeping the noise down and the signal (solutions and desires) clear, you will see improvements. (For example: Unified Progressive IPR and iray IPR now work in Maya 2013 SP1)

You can have the same success with fixes by following those guidelines above. This is why I may be more successful at using these tools, because I seek help and fixes through the correct channels. If you do not have support with Autodesk then it's more difficult. I cannot help you with that. But then coming into a forum and complaining you can't get anything done but won't go to support or pay for it doesn't get anyone anywhere. Should you shell out the money for a plug-in or support? Well, depends on your pipeline and needs.

If not then you don't get help. And I cannot help you. I understand you come in here hoping SOMEONE can help you but this is really a last resort because ARC cannot currently fix Maya. It's not theirs. And I know your post is hoping for some sort of response to reaffirm either your hope of change or disappointment in stagnation, but this isn't the place for that speculation.

(Sidenote 2: have you tried the Turtle plug-in? I don't know anything about it really since I don't deal with games a lot but it seems to be Autodesk's more focused solution for games inside Maya.)

[Kzin]

nvidia does not promote mental ray. i also think this is a problem, but it looks like no one at nvidia is seeing this. i hope this does not mean also a shift away from mr by nvidia. but if you look at the siggraph presentations by nvidia and you read that sony talkes about arnold and chaos group shows vray or vrayrt, then i dont know what i should think about this, because there is no talk about mr.
they want sell hardware in first place, thats their point.

[royter]

David, thanks alot for that useful information, hope you are right and that the current situation , hope it is really not so grim as I see it.
I know turtle is great and looking forward in learning it.

they want sell hardware in first place, that's their point.

how cursed are MR4Maya users ? really? stock between a company like Autodesk who doesn't give a dam about their default renderer, and the manufacturer of this renderer who doesn't give a dam about this renderer because it's just a product they bought when they didn't know what to do with their money? It's really the last thinh I expected when I started to use MR4Maya back in 2000 and it's the last thing I expected when Nvidia bought mental Images, it doesn't get worse than that.

[Remydrh]

I dunno, I think originally Autodesk wanted mental images. Talk about stuck between a rock and a hard place! Theoretically, the nVidia option was better because of the research and development they do that relates to rendering. But in this day and age we're stuck wth large corporations buying smaller ones and then killing off development. So why buy it? Especially if you don't license it.

The answer I would like to hear is: "mental ray is now a separate plug-in sold by mental ray through retail channels. With an open source translator and a new core, you can now 'render imagination visible.'"

Then I open a bottle of Cristal, so-on-and-so-forth.