The SSV Work In Progress

Some more development renders for the project I'm working on. 

Mental Ray comparison

I've been meaning to compare lightmap render times with mental ray for quite a while so here are the results for a 1024^2 lightmap. An example of the test scene can be seen in this post.  Direct and indirect light were calculated but I've only shown indirect light below.

Max 2010 / Mental Ray: 28 minutes

Settings: 

Final Gather set to 'High' preset with 1 diffuse bounce.

Lanczos filtering with 1 / 16 samples.

Logarithmic exposure control

Lit with mental ray sun / sky system

My app: 1 minute 30 seconds

Settings: 

3 bounces (total of  roughly 9000 rays per sample point)

 Lit with 1 directional light and HDR environment probe.

System specs.

Vista 64bit 

4gb ram

Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 @ 3.0ghz

Geforce 8800 gtx w/768mb ram

More renders

An update to yesterdays post, the lightmaps used in these shots were generated by my app and then rendered with mental ray. As before, no GI was used in max and the scene is lit with seven 1024^2 lightmaps. I haven't distributed the texel density of the scene very well so the shadow detail on the street / building surfaces suffers.