Converting Vray to mental ray

[TheAllusionist]

This question comes up a lot and I thought that starting a thread where people post the latest converters could be useful. Since Autodesk updates all the time as well as mental ray itself updating from time to time, scripts may no longer work.

Q: If you receive a model to work on that was used in vray, can it be converted to be used in mental ray. When I open the model, I get a warning messages about missing dlls and the materials dialog box is all blacked out with a message that reads as follows(this class does not have an implementation supplied by any of the currently loaded dlls.). if you go ahead and try to render the model nothing shows up. Is their anything which I can do to get this model to work.

A: First off you are not converting the model per say but the materials applied to the model/mesh and changing the active render engine. These conversions are going to be flawed and you will need to tweak the end results either manually or through an automated process. There are scripts out there, but Autodesk updates so much that it is difficult to keep one around that works. You will have to try several options:

Gtools_Material_Converter | ScriptSpot

Maxwell Material Converter | ScriptSpot

zap's mental ray tips: Max 9: Converting other materials to "Arch & Design"

You could just apply a default mental ray material to the whole scene or manually apply the materials you want, change render settings and you are probably good to go, but selecting all of the model and saving selected to a fresh file is probably a safer solution. Then just start working in the new file without the legacy Vray settings, dlls, etc.

I don't have much experience with this and the times I have used the process the results were less than stellar, but it may save you a lot of time on items that only a few materials are real apparent and require manual tweaking, like a library of cars where the body and glass are probably all you might have to adjust and get away without tweaking the others once you use a converter.

One of the reasons I like using mental ray is that a lot of straight max models (standard materials apply) render pretty good and don't cause the terminal errors that Vray scenes do. Really the problem with proprietory render engines using proprietory materials, mr seems the least offensive on that aspect.

Please add any links and advise you may have for converting. Of course these scripts work in the opposite direction and can convert mr to Vray!

[Rod]

another bit of sage advice from the guru of materials, thanks for the great advice..

[TheAllusionist]

Originally Posted by Rod

another bit of sage advice from the guru of materials, thanks for the great advice..

That post was by me, not Jeff Actually because of MrM I get all sorts of emails requesting help and just thought today if I start posting answers I can just link to the forum instead of replying to the basic same things over and over and over.....

This way if I am wrong and someone corrects me here the end user (person asking the question) can hopefully end up with the right answer

[d.sign]

Just to clarify as I tried manual conversion couple of times
- if you have Vray installed you will not get any of the warning messages on opening the scene untill you render out with Mr and get some Mr warnings...
- To render the scene in Mr you would have to clear it up of all Vray objects (lights, proxy, Vray cameras, planes etc.)
That should solve most of the problems with missing dll files, except of course, materials...
- Personal opinion - this is good point for software developers. I remember way back I tried using FinalRender and it had internal material converter if I recall well... it was realy nice, tabelar feature which included Vray, Standard and Brazil materials...
I think whoever include such feature in todays rendering engines would gain certain advantage over competition...

[TheAllusionist]

Good points and why I suggested saving out the mesh and bringing into a fresh file. As for the built-in converter, another great suggestion, it amazes me how this industry can get along without standards and compatibilities. Along with FinalRender's converter, Brazil has a script I believe for packaging up materials to share them with others. All of these items should be part of a third party render engine, due to Autodesk setting a precedence with Max, the whole industry behaves like it is operating in a vacuum.

Of course I can make off hand remarks about what they should do without in depth knowledge of the programming involved, so lets stick with items I bleive production houses have developed in-house. How about materials exporting out to XML files so that say a mental ray material could be used in Max, Maya and XSI for example by just importing and exporting the XML? With that infrastructure in place, why couldn't each render engine be able to import a material XML file and following that logic, built in converters would follow.

OK, so all the different render engines use different setting types, lets say maxwell is all BRDF and then in mental ray you can use that or standard legacy settings, there would need to be a sort of STANDARD or conversion table for this stuff and that makes it not that easy to go from all the third party render engines. But, it would seem it would go a long way in setting up materials for using in the same render engine on different platforms and different versions of the same software. Example would be, say from Max 7 on up where mental ray is incorporated, you would be able to import Max 2009 materials into Max 7 via XML or similar if they had something like this in place.

Well the reason you probably won't see it is that Autodesk needs every reason possible to force you to buy Max 2009, but it would be nice if the third party render engine companies developed a standard so that conversion was possible and independent of upgrades in the render engine itself. Just my two cents worth, we looked at doing something like this for MrM and may still do it, but only if the site thrives, all the programming comes out of my pocket, but the production house guys I have on my team say it can be done for say mental ray materials to translate from Max to Maya to XSI. I don't think some independant smuck like myself should do it, but the software developers themselves, so it must not be in their best interest.