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!
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.
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
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…