mentalray for Maya 2015 SP2 is now available and provides important fixes around XGen hair rendering, layering shaders, massive assembly scenes, native IBL and more. Here’s a short list of fixes that come with the new mental ray 3.12.1.16 and the new version of the mental ray plugin.
Please, consult the mental ray and the Maya 2015 SP1 and SP2 release notes for the complete list.
- XGen
The performance of the XGen hair shader has been significantly improved for scenes with dense hair. - Layering shaders (Mila)
Several fixes in the shaders and the UI – namely, possible crash with subsurface scattering initialization, possible NaN values and a too bright contribution of the user IBL environment shader in glossy components, reordering layers with bump or weight connection. - Binary Maya file compatibility with Maya 2014 restored
Some mental ray shader nodes saved in .mb files were not compatible between 2014 and 2015. This is now fixed. - GI GPU
Improved performance of the GPU and multi-CPU rendering, and added support for NVIDIA Maxwell GPUs. - Large scene with assemblies
Fixed possible crash when rendering large scenes with multiple assemblies exceeding physical memory. - Native environment lighting
IPR now automatically updates when changing the new “emit light” features which control the native environment lighting. Fixed brightness difference in IPR versus Render Current Frame.
Happy rendering,
Julia
Inside mental ray 
That sounds great 🙂
What about the LPE framebuffers?
http://docs.autodesk.com/MENTALRAY/2015/ENU/mental-ray-help/files/shaders/layering/framebuffers.html
Is it possible to get the new transparency behavior working in max/maya 2015?
Also the back_scatter framebuffer isn’t working for me. The front_scatter works fine, though.
The back_scatter pass is not working yet in SP2 unfortunately, and we hope this fix comes in a future SP.
Regarding the transparency, this part of the document is not quite reflecting the current goals of the mila LPE emulation, in which we wanted to have more flexibility with an additive passes to address common pipelines with simple pass additions.
I’ve started a forum post on this, since there is a lot to talk about, especially in detail, regarding varying pipelines in different production houses. http://forum.nvidia-arc.com/showthread.php?12940-mila-transparency-and-passes
[…] (More information can be found on the official mental ray blog here.) […]
MAX posts too, please! Maya is not the only program in the world people use Mental Ray with…
As soon as 3ds Max 2015 SP2 will be released later this year, we will update you on the progress there as well.
We are also planning to publish more tips and tricks that are application agnostic. Please stay tuned!
How to enable GI GPU , with strings, or is it exposed in render settings dialog in this SP2?
We will write more about GI GPU very soon. In Maya 2015 SP2, it can be enabled with string options.
Thank you, cant wait 🙂