CTRL_Ghost 2011 and mrHiddenOptions shaders expose MR Progressive Rendering in Softimage 2011

CTRL_Ghost is a custom shader by CTRL (have made many "hack" style MR shaders in the past.) The recently updated one for 3ds max 2011 works with Softimage and exposes the progressive rendering feature. You can download it from here and here.

The plugin also unlocks Image Based Lighting, Importions, FG Contrast, Irradiance Particles/Environment but most of this is unnecessary as the render manager exposes most of it. However, it may also expose Combined Final Gather + Irradiance Particles and Importons but I've not tested it yet.

Also in the running (and currently nicer to use) is mrHiddenOptions - the thread and downloads are here.

Both can be installed in your SI2011 User folder:
DLL file - "*\User\*\Softimage2011\Application\bin\nt-x86-64"
mi file - "*\User\*\Softimage2011\Application\mi" (without the "phenolib"folder already presented in the program directory.)


EDIT: (Now I know what it is...) Progressive rendering, rather than offering a fast preview like many new interactive renderers appearing now, it starts at the settings you set and then continues to refine the image over time. You set a limit to how many iterations you want it to process.


(mrHiddenOptions tested) It seems that with PR you can set your AA setting very low like Min -2 Max -1 which would normally look like this (scene is a group of reflective phong spheres - total 1,920,800 tris 0:00:10.02 for rendering):-

With PR switched on (wallclock  0:00:30.85 for rendering) and max_time =1 (one render iteration):-

From here PR continues to smooth AA, add bounces, reflection depth, etc. But I still don't think it has the same value as a feature as say, GPU acceleration or interactive rendering which starts extremely low and acts as an extremely useful way to quickly preview the scene. Bit like Octane.


I really don't think it will be long before a renderman-compliant GPU-based reyes renderer becomes commercially available.