Physical based Materials for mental ray Maya??

melviso

I haven't been able to grasp the whole Physical based materials thingy but I do understand it works for shaders in the viewport.But is there something like this for realistic renders like mental ray?or are BDRF materials more accurate than PBL shaders?
Also do BDRF materials take longer time to render?
Btw,I understand BDRF shaders work with settings for materials the way pbl shaders work as well.

LMP

Mental Ray is more realistic then PBR. With Mental Ray you get ray tracing, there is no ray tracing with real-time PBR shaders.

Shrike

Mental ray (never used that one) Offline renderers in general use PBR shaders as the movie guys are a couple years ahead, but it seems like they all use some sort of own interpretation and a lot of different shaders instead of using one master thing and some deviations like we use with our game PBR stuff, which are all kinda similar at their core.

The offline shaders can be very confusing, when I started 3D I was standing infront of those strange cinema 4D shaders and they dont have a spec input and strange stuff, and now like 10 years later, I realize that they were doing the PBR thing all along the whole freaking time. I started heck confused, totally didnt understand the game workflow, cursed Maxon for their stupid shit that was so different than all the others, and now after setting up my own PBR pipeline, I finally realize. Mindblown

Ok drifting off

BRDF is simply the core of the shader if you want so. PBR shaders are using a BRDF aswell, its the function that tells how light interacts etc.
"BRDF Shader" means simply "shader"

Look if you can find something that uses image based lighting or has a reflection
slot where you can put in a specular map and uses fresnel, uses gloss / roughness with energy conservation and uses the blinn-phong model.

Mental ray should have all the features of the game PBR shaders, but the clear superior lighting with raytraced GI, superior AO and extremely superior shadows etc.

rube

Your best bet in mental ray is probably using the mia_material_x shader or mia_material_x_passes. They're more complicated than the albedo, roughness, etc shaders typical in realtime though. Or if you're using maya 2015 they've implemented the MILA shaders which are physically based/energy conserving and lighter than the mia shaders from what I understand (I haven't used them yet).

melviso

Thanks guys.I am using the student version of Maya 2015.I will definitely look into the MILA shaders.