Understanding rendering theory, which software to use, file formats ...

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I am kind of starting off in graphics theory, there is so much to learn.

Firstly, it is so difficult even choosing the software to use, for example, can Blender do everything that say Maya and 3ds Max can do. And what even is the difference between Maya and 3ds Max. How can one company release such similar products, what could be so different as to release two separate products that essentially do the same thing(as far as I can see)?

Is Blender a full 3D suite, can you 3D model, sculpt, animate, apply all lighting and shader effects?

As I said there are so many software packages and I still can’t find a definite answer to my questions, as far as I can make out most of it comes down to the interface and usability of the software rather than the features it has.

Secondly, what are the differences between say Mental Ray and Blender, now I have read up on Global illumination and the various algorithms such as path tracing, ray tracing and ray casting. I know a bit about C++ and know that these algorithms to represent light are actually fairly straightforward to implement compared to more approximate methods such as rasterization, which makes me wonder why Mental Ray is regarded as being such high end software that is the film industry standard. Does Blender implement full Global Illumination, why can’t Blender have the functionality that say Mental Ray has, if it doesn’t?

Finally how do you understand file formats and their relationship to a game engines renderer. For example you have many file formats and standards such as blend, obj, x3d, dae, 3ds, fbx, anim. Now these are all standards to represent data, vertex points, and colour points, effects and such, you could represent these as a table of ascii numerical values for example like the ppm format.

So how is a game engine able to understand so many different file formats, does the engine firstly convert these formats to a format that it can work with. Is it analogous to the different CPU architectures like ARM, X86, Z80, PowerPC. You need an emulator to be able to port software from one architecture to another for example, is this how a game engine is able to work with so many different exported model and animation formats?

So thanks for any help!

Maybe this belongs in the Game Engine forum, if so sorry about that!

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Maya and 3ds Max. How can one company release such similar products, what could be so different as to release two separate products that essentially do the same thing(as far as I can see)?

those are totaly diffrent programs for totaly diffrent stuff.

can Blender do everything that say Maya and 3ds Max

No. But max and maya can’t do many stuff that blender can do. it works in bove dirrections.

Is Blender a full 3D suite, can you 3D model, sculpt, animate, apply all lighting and shader effects?

Blender is currently the best all in one app on the market.
It comes with Modeling, texturing, rigging, painting, VFX, compositor, rendering, bakeing, even game engine.

Mental Ray

this rendering engine is acctualy not used. Everyone is using, V-ray or Arnold.

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yes blender had global illumination but its in cycles its a blender project but it will soon be a stand alone software

and i doubt any modern 3d software runs on the z80 xD

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The point was that there are plenty of Z80 emulators out there.

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Yes and no. Blender can do pretty much everything (and more) that Maya and 3ds Max can, however there are some really awesome plugins for Max and Maya that don’t exist for Blender.

Well it seems that Autodesk is pushing Maya to be their do-it-all software and they already laid off Softimage but Maya is mostly used for animation and games while 3ds Max is the product of choice for people who do a lot of Archviz (Architectural Visualization) and also for some VFX stuff like particle effects and such.

Yup, Blender is probably the most full-featured 3D software package that exist today. In Blender you can take care of literally your whole pipeline whether you are making games, films, animations, archviz, etc. Do note however that just because you can do it all in Blender doesn’t necessarily mean that you should or would want to since other software exists that specializes in their field and does it much better than Blender.

That depends. If you are planning to work in the industry you need to learn whatever software the company you want to work for are using and they typically choose their software for the features or for time-saving purposes, not for interface or usability.

The only reason that Mental Ray is considered an “industry standard” is because it was one of the first production-ready render engines that featured modern lighting algorithms such as global illumination. It was the best of it’s time but is now considered pretty old and outdated, some companies stick with it because they are so familiar with the workflow or have developed their own shader/lighting/optimization libraries to use with it so they are reluctant to change.

Mental Ray was what Cycles proposes to be today. A render engine focused on rendering animations, however back when Mental Ray was popular the computers were kinda slow and couldn’t calculate accurate GI for every frame of an animation in a decent amount of time so Mental Ray uses a lot of tricks to speed up the rendering process. For example it uses a photon-based GI algorithm called “Final Gather” that is really slow to calculate the GI but when you have calculated it once you can then save it to a file and use it on the rest of your frames to avoid having to recalculate it for every frame. However for this to work correctly you needed to render your final gather map on really high settings, else you tend to get big dark blotches where not enough photons reached and Mental Ray tried to “smudge” the surrounding light photons around to accumulate for the lack of light.

Cycles on the other hand uses only brute force path-tracing. This lighting algorithm is better for animations since it has no need to pre-calculate anything before the actual rendering begins and it produces no blotchy surfaces in your animation.

Nvidia (who made Mental Ray) is also using it as a base for their new render engine “Iray” which is more like Cycles.

I have not read up on file-formats well enough to answer your last question, sorry.

Also.

Mental Ray IS used in many studios around the world. It might not be as popular as Arnold and Vray nowadays but some people stick with what they know and Mental Ray used to be as popular as Vray is now.

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Can you use Arnold with .blend files?

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No.

Well, you can always export them to Maya/Softimage, but otherwise, no.

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