A forum for readers of the third mental ray handbook

[ack]

Writing mental ray Shaders has at last been published. This third volume in the series of mental ray handbooks is a tutorial introduction to shader programming. All the software and scene files discussed in the book are available at the book's website. The book also includes a CDROM that contains a fully functional version of mental ray.

You can use this forum to discuss Writing mental ray Shaders: ask questions, discuss topics the book raises, and report any errors you may find. Based on the posts in this forum, I'll add material to the book's website to correct and augment the book.

I hope you find this book a useful introduction to shader programming in mental ray.

Andy Kopra

[boomji]

Whoaaa !!! Finally :P
This is going to help us mumbai chaps loads.
Congrats.


b

[home3d2001]

Cool,finally this great book is out.

I have some questions and hope someone helps me out.

1-What is the difference between mental ray Stand alone comes with the book and real the Maya Standalone that is used by companies?

2-Is it possible to connect the mental ray standalone that comes with the book with a software like massive to render out the scene ?

3-What are the limitations with mental ray standalone that comes with the book than the real mental ray standalone?


Thanks ,

[ack]

I have improved the book's CDROM webpage to answer some of the questions about the mental ray version on the CDROM. This standalone version is based on the same mental ray library as the commercial version; it is only limited in the way that it is "nodelocked" to a single machine. For a description of the relationship of mental ray standalone to the various applications in which it is used (Maya, Massive, etc.), see the last section of the "Getting started" webpage for the book. If an application can export a .mi scene file, then you can render it with the CDROM mental ray version as long as you have access to the shaders the .mi file references.

Andy

[mkesson]

Andy,
Thank you for your wonderful book.
I have installed the demo version from the CD onto my laptop MacOSX (32bit) computer. I rendered a .mi scene file OK. Then later I restarted the computer and found I could not obtain a license. I ran the "SPMDemoLicenseManager" again, filled out all the fields (again) and was able to render (again). Does this mean the demo version of mr has to be re-licensed each and every time I want to render? Or, perhaps I've really screwed up and once I've registered via "SPMDemoLicenseManager" I'm set to (repeatedly) render from session to session.
Best regards,
Malcolm Kesson

[mkesson]

The problem I experienced with my Mac laptop (os 10.5.4) was caused by the licensing software, located at,
/var/spm/spmd_ib
was not given the appropriate permissions to run its demon. After installing mental ray from the CD everything was fine until I restarted the laptop. I was prompted by a dialog box at startup to "Fix" something ie. spmd_ib. I choose the "Ignore" button because I didn't want to cause an issue with mr licensing. I should have choose "Fix". On the advice of Andy, if I get the following error when attempting to render a .mi file,

FATAL ERROR (/usr/local/mi/mrdemo/bin/ray) at 10/11/2008 09:58:14 :
Can't connect to any SPM license server.
I do the following. Open a terminal and use sudo,
malcolm$ sudo -s

then I double check to see if the license server is running,
malcolm$ /var/spm/spmstat

finally, I start the service,
malcolm$ /var/spm/spmd_ib

I hope this helps others who may experience similar difficulties.
Malcolm Kesson

[bart]

It should actually be installed as a service, so that you don't have to manually start it. See /System/Library/StartupItems (or /Library/StartupItems) and look for the spm directory. That should provide something that starts up spmd_ib for you.

Did you fix the permissions problems?

[mkesson]

Hello Bart,
I fixed the permissions and once I apply your suggestions about startup I'm sure I will not have to restart the license server. However, I think when the Mac goes to sleep the server will drop out of use but its not a big deal to sudo and get it going.

I have been very busy completely rewriting my notes on my fundza.com website concerning the use of my Cutter text editor with the version of ray that comes with volume III. It will be of benefit to those who are not sure how to write their own makefiles and vs8 bat files because it does all that for the user. Unfortunately, the current version of Cutter needs updating and I hope to have that uploaded along with the notes on its use tomorrow.
Many thanks,
Malcolm

[mkesson]

Inspired by Andy's book I have completely revised the notes on how to setup and use the Cutter text editor for compiling shaders and rendering scene files. Those who would like to try Cutter for mental ray scripting should download the pre release version (5.5.2),
http://fundza.com/cutter/prerelease/index.html

the notes dealing with Cutter and mr can be found at,
http://fundza.com

Malcolm