MR>XSI All Purpose Thread

[Jak_Carver]

Great forum guys, fantastic job. Im a MR user no matter what app Im using, max, Maya, or XSI. I think we should begin making a sticky on techniques for MR with XSI right here. What does everyone think? Info for MR with XSI is very rare and scarce so this would be a great place to put some of those hot tips. If anyone has any questions on MR with XSI please post them here so we can answer them.

[T4D]

yeah Agree MR started in XSI it seems But it's now getting left out of the community Behide Max and Maya, XSI people need to share more

[Jak_Carver]

Well is there anything in particular you would like to know?

[hot chip]

hi,

this site have 101 examples szene vor XSI.

http://www.edharriss.com/tutorials/tutorials_render_XSI.html

and the German-Wiki MR-Link Site: http://www.german-mentalray-wiki.info/doku.php?id=mental_ray_links

mfg
hot chip

[Jak_Carver]

Unfortunately that is a very old and outdated sight. The techniques are solid but alot of these things can be done in half the time or there are faster/easier implementations in XSI 5.x

[jclark]

Unfortunately that is a very old and outdated sight. The techniques are solid but alot of these things can be done in half the time or there are faster/easier implementations in XSI 5.x

There is useful stuff for sure at Ed Harris' site but a lot of the tutorials revolve around 3.x or older. I found my self searching alot and was hard pressed to come up with anything 5.x related.

[giant551]

Hi guys, Just to say hello really and what a great site i hope it continues to grow !!!

Well i am fairly new to XSI so i won't be able to offer any dazzling mentalray tips just yet:) I made the transition from Rhino about 6 months ago and are starting to find my feet mentalray.

I got to say i agree with some of the other posts, i have found the learning process kind of hard with not a great deal of good quality tutorials out there. I bought the digital tutors into to mentalray DVD which has helped a lot but i still find most of the posts in the XSi forums might as well be written in Greek for what i understand of them at the moment:D

I have also found some usefull stuff over at evermotion for XSI 4.2.

Anyway i look forward to being an active part of this forum and swapping of ideas. Ive been triyng out some different lighting rigs for a couple of my models over the last few days so i will share my little experiments when i get home for discussion (probably on not how to do it LOL)

cheers guys

Paul

[yencaray]

ok heres a question. I'm a maya user have been for years. I've recently switched to XSI. the first thing i notcied is in maya theres a mental ray shaders section in the hypershade. Wheres the same thing or similar in XSI so i can get access to all of mental rays shaders? I've also heard that mental ray in XSI doesn't have all the mental ray shaders either. How do i get them? I'm kinda feeling like mental ray for XSI got jipped here a little. Compared with mental ray maya i feel like i have more power then in mental ray XSI. But i'm still learning. But ya know it's been very easy coming from maya to XSI.

[Chris_TC]

ok heres a question. I'm a maya user have been for years. I've recently switched to XSI. the first thing i notcied is in maya theres a mental ray shaders section in the hypershade. Wheres the same thing or similar in XSI so i can get access to all of mental rays shaders? I've also heard that mental ray in XSI doesn't have all the mental ray shaders either. How do i get them? I'm kinda feeling like mental ray for XSI got jipped here a little. Compared with mental ray maya i feel like i have more power then in mental ray XSI. But i'm still learning. But ya know it's been very easy coming from maya to XSI.

All shaders in XSI are mental ray shaders because mental ray is XSI's only rendering engine while Maya also has the software renderer.

You get access to all nodes in the render tree, some may be a little hidden under the More... button. There's lots of cool additional shaders available that you can download and install, you'll find most of these over on XSIBase.com
Hopefully, this site here will become a great mental ray resource though.

[Jak_Carver]

Well what he means is how to access the mi library of shaders. Unfortunately the standard shaders in XSI are NOT mi materials, not trying to make you look bad Chris but just clearing that up.

The mi library of shaders unfortunately is NOT exposed entirely in XSI (which is incredibly stupid and I dont know for the life of me why Softimage did this!).

Although you cant use all the mi shaders in XSI, many of the most commonly used mi shaders can be used in XSI, but you need to hunt them down as addons. Go to the Netview (short cut is Alt+5) and do a search for "Xphysics", this is a shader addon pack that "unlocks" the mi_DGS, Dialectric, and I believe the transmat shaders. You may also want to pay a visit to www.tek2shoot.com and download their shader addon pack which unlocks alot of mi shaders, in particular the mi_physical light shader as well as some other useful mental ray light shaders.

Although this wont expose all the mi shaders that are available in Maya, this should allow you to do most of everything you used to do in MR for Maya. Hope that helps and have fun using MR, as it is faster and better integrated into XSI than Maya (except for the stupid shader library limitation, of which I would like to beat over the head of whoever the smart guy was at Softimage that decided to cut them out!).

P.S. Please not that you can expose all of the mi shaders in XSI if you do a little bit of coding :)

[Chris_TC]

Well what he means is how to access the mi library of shaders. Unfortunately the standard shaders in XSI are NOT mi materials, not trying to make you look bad Chris but just clearing that up.

No worries, thanks for explaining.

[Nicolas]

Sorry, but if xsi shaders are not mi shaders, then what are they?
What makes a xsi shader not a MI material while its rendering in MI? If you mean a shader that wasnt originally released with an MI version, then wouldnt that make all 3rd party MI shaders not MI shaders?

[Jak_Carver]

what I mean is that the XSI library of shaders arent all mental images base shaders (mib_xxxx). The mib library of shaders are well, a different library of shaders thats all.

For example, take the XSI blinn shader, it is well, XSI's blinn shader. The mib_Illum_Blinn is the blinn shader from the mental images base shader library. If you have a look at each, you will notice they are different shaders, similar yes, but different nonetheless. You can work with either one though, just depends on what the artist is after.

[Nicolas]

XSI's shaders are no less MI materials than Daniel Rind's materials are MI materials or Francesca's and so on. One of the powers of MI is the ability to write and customize shaders. And many people and studio's big and small do. MI is meant as a rendering platform that can be developped on, like Renderman, and this is why it has gained much popularity, along with its other advantages in technology and performance. Mental Images does supply a "base package" of shaders, just like xsi ships with a collection of rendertree presets (eyeballs and such), but for softimage to code different shading algorithms or new shaders entirely does not make them inferior or "less authentic" in any way. They have been developping on MI for over 10 years. You might say they have some experience.

In that, XSI's materials are definitivily MI materials.

XSI also has another advantage with mental ray. Unlike maya and max, XSI shares its memory architecture with mental ray. This means that when you render in XSI, MI can directly read your XSI scene. The scene is in memory once.
In max and maya, where MI is a plugin renderer, when you hit render, the scene must be converted to MI language and is thus in memory twice. For large scenes this has obvious performance issues.

[Jak_Carver]

XSI's shaders are no less MI materials than Daniel Rind's materials are MI materials or Francesca's and so on. One of the powers of MI is the ability to write and customize shaders. And many people and studio's big and small do. MI is meant as a rendering platform that can be developped on, like Renderman, and this is why it has gained much popularity, along with its other advantages in technology and performance. Mental Images does supply a "base package" of shaders, just like xsi ships with a collection of rendertree presets (eyeballs and such), but for softimage to code different shading algorithms or new shaders entirely does not make them inferior or "less authentic" in any way. They have been developping on MI for over 10 years. You might say they have some experience.

In that, XSI's materials are definitivily MI materials.

XSI also has another advantage with mental ray. Unlike maya and max, XSI shares its memory architecture with mental ray. This means that when you render in XSI, MI can directly read your XSI scene. The scene is in memory once.
In max and maya, where MI is a plugin renderer, when you hit render, the scene must be converted to MI language and is thus in memory twice. For large scenes this has obvious performance issues.


Youre totally right, I was just pointing out that the "mib" shaders are original shaders from mental images themselves :)

And of course XSI's integration of MR is better, its a full integration whereas Max's and Maya's are just outside plugins. Trust me, I have experience with MR in Maya and the so called "integration" is horrible IMHO. I would render in MR/XSI over Maya any day of the week, unfortunately sometimes you're forced to work with Maya depending on a job.

[Kashif C. Riley]

Hello, I am quite new to this forum, I am known as James Rayder on XSIBase and I have a question about using the mia_material shader because while the shader is really quick (I was using DGS shaders) what the hell is the Mode option in the lights section? I am not using XSI 6 btw...

[hot chip]

hi,

mode=0 / nothing

mode=1 / include lights

mode=2 / exlcude lights

[Kashif C. Riley]

oh okay cool...now I get it...now to figure out how to get the light to act like physical light to work

[andystopps]

My hottest tip for using MR with XSI is to always render sequences from the command line. The XSI interface uses a lot of memory and rendering a sequence of any length almost invariably results in a crash somewhere along the line. Very irritating if you come back some hours later to find the render stuck at frame number 15 or so. There are several scripts and plugins around to make this easier for non-programers and idiots like me who can't type accurately. Kim Aldis's Batchmaker works from within XSI and is very convenient, or you can use RenderQ, which is a standalone ( I favour using the Rqclient part of it and editing the .bat file myself, rather than using the RenderQ interface, which can be a bit cranky).
It's worth bearing in mind that XSI crashes often seem to be connected with interactions with other software, such as video card drivers, and QuickTime (!).

[Quiesia09]

Any info on why a bunch of the jabbers including xochat look to be down last couple of days? Strange all at same time.