Quote - @luvver_3d:
I'm sure I just read your post in the Poser Forum where you quoted my opinion on 3ds Max 9's MR renderer vs. C5's renderer, and then replied that there aren't any advantages between one raytracer and the next.
Since "a raytrace is a raytracer."; how could anything assosciated with MR, then, have any qualities or advantages that are any different than 'any other raytracer'?
Every tool has it's advantages and disadvatages, is my opinion. I don't view it as somehow sacreligious to discuss them; and I use whatever tool I have that is bested suited for whatever I need to do at the time.

Not trying to be nasty or anything, just curious about what it is that made you reverse your opinion so completely on the issue in the space of two days' time?
And don't worry, I'm not going to be hounding after you or anything, it's just that I had posted in both the threads, so the post notification ebot brought me to the threads.

You obviously didn't read all my posts in the other thread, or you would have the answer to this already.  In the other thread, I said "raytracing is raytracing", and that's absolutely true.  For what operaguy wanted to do, any raytrace engine would work well enough.  You explain to me how reflections or refractions or raytraced shadows in Mental Ray are any better than the same things in Carrara or Vue.  They're not.  Why?  Because raytracing does the same thing in all of these apps.  Pretty reflections can be had just as well in Carrara as in Max or Maya.  End of discussion on that.

Now on the matter of the sss skin shader, we're no longer talking about RAYTRACING in and of itself.  We're talking about application-specific shaders that were designed specifically for working with a particular render engine.  Of course it's not the same.  In that case, one can be better than the other.

Anything else?