"It was funny when someone else brought up MentalRay vs Carrara's renderer in Vue forum. The thread were locked and did not have an opporunity to post below."

LOL! You're funny, Gweb. I gave you multiple links to MentalRay's renderer specs in that Vue thread, and even posted them to the thread itself, but you simply refused to look. No matter what anyone says, Carrara is the best to you, and that's fine. I have no problem with Carrara personally, and I think it's a great program.

However, comparatively speaking about MentalRay, here's a couple questions I would ask you:

1. Can Carrara render out user-defined frame buffers from G-buffer channels like specularity, reflections, diffuse, ambient, Z-depth, and shadows in a single render pass for assembly in a post-processing video FX editor like AfterEffects, Combustion, etc.? This provides extreme control over every aspect of a CG animation in post. For example, if your director decides after the render is complete that he would like to adjust the specular or diffuse color on some objects, you don't have to re-render the scene... for instance, you can accurately adjust ONLY the spec or diffuse layers, or change the color of shadows easily in post without affecting any of the other properties of the render. By saving the Z-depth info, you can save valuable render time by applying DOF or fog, etc. to your animation in post, rather than rendering it out. Things like this can prove very valuable to pros when they're working on something in a limited timeframe.

2. Can Carrara's GI solution be saved to a file, and re-used in an animation, so that when the camera moves, only the necessary photons are mapped to the existing pre-calculated solution, allowing MUCH faster GI rendering in an animated scene, since the renderer does not need to re-calculate the GI for every frame from scratch. Renderers like Brazil, Vray, and MentalRay have the ability to cache the intial photon map, and add to it incrementally on a frame-by-frame basis.

3. Can Carrara render micro-triangle displacement like Mental Ray?

4. In MentalRay, "incremental scene echo" allows streaming of scene data in .mi format such that only differences between successive frames are sent. What's that mean? Faster rendering of complex scenes, and better memory efficiency.

5. Is motion blur in Carrara visible in reflections/refractions and through transparent objects? Are caustics and global illumination cast by moving objects or moving lights correctly motion-blurred?

6. Can Carrara create on-demand loading of object files and on-demand procedural object creation using geometry shaders: in MentalRay, geometry is not created until it is needed, the geometry cache maintains only objects currently or recently in use to reduce rendering times and concurrent memory requirements.

These are just a few of the things I would ask you about Carrara, when insisting it can do what MentalRay can do.

Again, I'm not here to start a war, I'm just trying to point out some things, and perhaps even enlighten myself and others about the subject.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again... in my opinion, Carrara is the best value for the buck, and is definitely the best mid-level 3D app you can buy. It certainly is capable of producing movies and high quality results... but high-end pros need certain levels of control in a renderer/application that Carrara may not be able to deliver like the high end apps can. I'm sure most people here realize that. :-)
Message edited on: 11/04/2004 14:43

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