G'day all.
By "production grade", I assumed that meant "suitable for use in a
production".
Quoting Sebastian Sylvan
Neither does mentalray!
Correct! Most production renderers don't have GUIs. Anything that REQUIRES a GUI is by definition a toy because it can't be used in a farm. But I digress.
"production grade" probably means:
"Production grade" means that you need to get a couple of hundred little things correct. That's true of any application, whether it's a renderer or a database server. For example: If memory can hold N "things", the system shouldn't thrash if you feed it N+2. On real productions, the #1 thing that you need is flexibility. You ideally want at least two ways to do any one task (so you can choose which is the most appropriate), and for as many knobs as possible to be exposed so you can tweak them. And at the highest level, the main thing I'd be looking for is some degree of standards compliance. I want to be able to take my modeller (say, Maya), and render the scene in at least two different renderers, and for the resulting images to line up exactly. That way, I can render elements separately, using the most appropriate tool for each element, and combine them afterwards. And given that ray tracing requires the highest-level geometry for the entire scene be retained in an online database (often in memory), I want to avoid that if I don't need it for some element. Remember that rendering 85 minute movie (typical length for an animated feature), at 24 frames per second, allowing a year of computer time, gives me less than five minutes to spend on each frame, and that assumes you can keep the pipeline full 24/7 and you only compute each frame once. Yes, you can multiply that by the number of CPUs in your render farm, but still, that's what you're up against when you're talking "production grade". Cheers, Andrew Bromage