The Rendering Debate

For the past few days, I've been troubleshooting some renders of the exterior apartment model to get an idea of whether I should use Renderman for Maya or Mental Ray. RmF has the advantages of subdividing geometry at render time, yielding beautiful and quick motion blur, and streamlining the process of exporting multi-pass EXRs. Its downsides are that it is only supported on a few machine in USC's render farm, and it is not commonly used at VFX houses (which are a possible outlet for me at this point in time.) It's also not yet available for Maya 2009.

Mental Ray has the advantages of being more widely supported on our render farm as well as at various VFX houses' farms. It can also subdivide at render time, but only in Maya 2009. Its downsides are its painfully slow to render motion blur, and its tendency to get very buggy (as I've learned over the past couple of years here, especially while taking a compositing class this semester.)

I've been modeling in Maya 2009 because of several GUI updates that have helped me streamline my workflow, such as readily-displayed buttons to isolate selected geometry (which has been extremely useful given the number of objects I have, as well as the high polygon count on certain objects) as well as toggles for specific shading modes such as wireframe on shaded. These are very minor details, but they are welcome additions to my workflow since they allow me to cut corners and work more fluidly, with minimal stopping for digging through menus for various options. Additionally, in my compositing class, Eric Hanson walked us through an introduction to exporting multi-pass EXRs, which is not an available feature in Maya 2008.

As great as the Maya 2009 interface is, I have not gone too in-depth to any of the lighting or rendering features, so I have no commitment to it. However, it has a great advantage in it allowing subdivision at render time, because this saves me the hassle of converting polygon objects to subdivision objects, which annoyingly replaces my own naming (e.g. "stairs_hero_2005") with default conventions (e.g. "subdivSurface_1.") This is especially hindering because I have hundreds of objects in my scene, and many of them are varied duplicates of others, as I started with one apartment building/facade and duplicated it several times in order to create the row of buildings for the wide shots. Again, however, Maya 2009 is not fully supported at the VFX houses at which I have an opportunity to render.

I'm going to keep testing some things, so hopefully I'll be off the fence the next time around.