MentalRay and Cycles

Not sure if this is exactly the best place for this, but I am curious to know, what exactly are the differences between Cycles and MentalRay, I know that they render differently, but I am wring a paper on this, and I have looked all over and have found very little on the actual technical side of the differences, all I am really able to find is just comparisons of different images from different renders.

Any information you guys can give me would really go a long ways, so, thanks in advance! :slight_smile:

Honestly, this is a really vague question and I think it’s going to be hard to write anything on the subject if you haven’t used both. You mention they render differently, but that’s a tricky thing to define, especially considering all the different modes and options MR has. Mental Ray has been around a long time and has had a lot of various functions and crap glued into it over the years. Enable unified sampling and final gather w/o caching, and it renders very much like Cycles. Switch to scaneline mode and “global illumination” (aka photon mapping) and it renders rather less like Cycles.

If you want general info about MR, the elemental ray blog is a decent place to start: http://elementalray.wordpress.com/
Master Zap’s blog is decent too: http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com/

Do you have some more specific questions?

Really all I am looking for is just general information about how it differs from Cycles, like Cycles uses path tracing, for the light, and I am not sure off hand what MentalRay uses.

Right now I just need some general information about the two and what some major differences in how they work are. I will read the links you posted in the morning. Haha

Thank you for your help! :slight_smile:

Mental Ray can use path tracing, or photon mapping, or irradiance caching, or photon mapping with irradiance caching, or a caching algorithm called irradiance particles, or just AO, or nothing…