Feature Request: Mental Ray Intergration

[Cyber-Angel]

In some future version of Terragen it would be nice if we could have Mental Ray as an alternative renderer in Terragen since Mental Ray is already integrated into other Applications Maya, 3DS Max and XSI come to mind. If TG2 is going to be used as I imagen it is intended to be, used in high-end production enviroments then Mental Ray as one of the industry standards the others the come to mind are POV-Ray, Brazil Render System and PR-Renderman then people who work in highend production would expect to see Mentalray as part of the feature set in future.

I be leave that Mental Images has a developer API for Mental Ray to allow in to be integrated into other applications and with the integration of Mental ray Terragen will gain many rendering features that it dose not have at present such as photon mapping.

This maybe to far out of Terragens reach, but it would be nice if possible.

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel   

[Oshyan]

A large part of TG2's fundamental value lies in its renderer. The Terragen rendering system has been explicitly designed to do things that few - if any - other rendering systems can do. Replacing it with another system simply doesn't make any sense. You would not get the same level of results from a Terragen 2 scene rendered in Mental Ray or indeed any other renderer, even assuming such integration would be possible.

It would make more sense instead to allow TG2 to render elements of the scene that other programs struggle with and at which TG2 excels (terrain, atmospherics, lighting, instancing) and then integrate that tightly with the rendering capabilities of another system such as Mental Ray with stronger general-purpose capabilities. This is how most other such special-use rendering systems like Terragen work, either through advanced automated compositing systems or direct rendering data exchange. This is a possibility we will be investigating in the future.

- Oshyan

[JimB]

As a related question, where I would render certain elements in Mental Ray and the environment in TG2, what compositing elements will be available? The most important for me would be:

Cloud Alpha - isolate clouds from rest of atmosphere and terrain.
Terrain Alpha - like above (already present?)
Sunlight pass - no GI
GI pass - no sunlight 
Objects Alpha - objects and populations have their own mask clipped by the terrain
Z-Depth
Shadows
Normals
Image lighting - a cubic cross /lightprobe / cylindrical / spherical low resolution HDRI image for use in lighting in another 3D app.

I'm pretty sure there are workarounds for these by rendering multiple passes separately in various ways. But having automated layer and element render passes is one of the key values of an app like XSI, etc, where any final composite can be tweaked to a great degree.