Class05 - New Maya Render Settings UI to expose Unified Sampling and Environment Light, HDR sunrise sequence

First things first, I installed the MR rendersettings v0.3 for Maya 2013 scripts

https://code.google.com/p/maya-render-settings-mental-ray/

go download the mr-rendersettings v0.3, Maya 2013 zip file

place the mel files into your users scripts directory and restart Maya C:\Users\JackMack\Documents\maya\2013-x64\scripts

NOTE: this will not work in Maya 2013.5

A public rewrite of the user interface for mental ray's render settings in Maya. The emphasis of this project are simplicity and modern workflow.  This project incorporates the latest mental ray settings into the Maya UI. The UI files are written in mel.

If you want access to the hidden mental ray 3.10 features without using these scripts, expose here using the string options.

select miDefaultOptions;

I prefer just using this set of scripts to reveal the MR features and reportedly Maya 2014 put most of these menues into the new Maya in almost the same way.

Great info from elementalray blog on Unified Sampling

http://elementalray.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/unified-sampling/

For the layman, unified sampling is a new sampling pattern for mental ray which is much smarter than the older Anti-Aliasing (AA) sampling grid.  Unified is smarter because it will only take samples when and where it needs to.  This means less wasted sampling (especially with things like motion blur), faster render times, and an improved ability resolve fine details.

Technically speaking, unified is Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) sampling across both image space and time.  Sampling is stratified based on QMC patterns and internal error estimations (not just color contrast) that are calculated between both individual samples and pixels as a whole.  This allows unified to find and adaptively sample detail on a scale smaller than a pixel.

“samples quality”

• This is the slider to control image quality.  Increasing quality makes things look better but take longer.  Do testing at 0.2 or so, then final render at 1.0
• It does this by adaptively increasing the sampling in regions of greater error (as determined by the internal error estimations mentioned before).
• You can think of quality as a samples per error setting.

http://elementalray.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/new-maya-rendering-ui-testing/

http://elementalray.wordpress.com/category/unified-sampling/page/2/

list of current and new features of mental ray verions, currently using 3.10.1.4

http://docs.autodesk.com/MENTALRAY/2013/ENU/mental-ray-help/files/relnotes/relnotes.html

Environment Light

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=87&t=1089213

http://elementalray.wordpress.com/2013/01/18/the-native-builtin-ibl/

You can use the regular Maya procedure for adding an HDRI or a Texture to light the scene including the flags. You can also attach any environment to the camera such as an environment shader, environment switch or Sun & Sky.

1) you can increase the verbosity of the output in the Maya Rendering Menu > Render > Render Current Frame (options box)

2) Time Diagnostic Buffer - check on the “Diagnostic” box in the Render Settings.

and EXR file will write out to \projects\project_name\renderData\mentalray\diagnostic.exr

http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Data/skyprobes/

To get an animated sequence of HDR images into your IBL node (mapping angular), switch type from file to texture, then input a standard Maya texture that can import a sequence.