Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/147928
review rendering Visualizer for Maya $299 Caustic Professional (subsidiary of Imagination Technologies) www.caustic.com Caustic Visualizer for Maya By Gavin Greenwalt At face value, what the Caustic Visualizer plug-in offers an artist is simple: real-time photorealistic raytracing. Visualizer is the first in a planned set of plug-ins for Autodesk's Maya and, in June, 3ds Max. Visualizer for Maya adds to the viewport's rasterized OpenGL renderer a fully raytraced OpenRL viewport rendering mode as well as a production renderer. This isn't just an updating view like IPR, but a full-fledged interactive viewport with transform manipulators, lights, shapes, bones, vertexes/edge overlays, and everything else you would expect in a regular viewport but with the added fidelity normally reserved for a final-frame renderers. The easiest way to understand what Visualizer gives you is to take the functionality of Maya's new Viewport 2.0 but with the image quality of Nvidia's Mental Ray. For a real-time raytracer, Visualizer supports an impressive slice of both Maya's and Mental Ray's built-in shaders and lights. With the exception of a couple notable omissions, such as subsurface scattering and 3D motion blur, Visualizer offers a nearly complete emulation of Mental Ray's look and feel, right down to Maya's color management system. I found a few discrepancies between the Visualizer preview and a Mental Ray render; however, the developers are extremely responsive and seem to be committed to perfectly emulating Mental Ray's look. I found in my testing that the number of final shader tweaks needing to get a match in Mental Ray for final output were usually minimal. Even with extremely complex multi-layered shaders, Visualizer faithfully reproduced the shader network. I was very skeptical that a third party could accurately emulate all of the idiosyncrasies of Maya's materials, but Visualizer has proven up to the task, easily besting Maya's own Viewport 2.0. And with Visualizer's batch renderer, if you're happy with the image in your viewport, you're done, no tweaking necessary! Visualizer is just like working in any other Maya viewport, but delivers a photorealistic image as you're working. When it comes to interactivity, Visualizer is in its own class. No other GPU renderer or IPR solution for Maya comes close. While other real-time raytracers, like V-Ray RT, can have up to a second or two of latency after making a change, Visualizer delivers multiple frames per second of feedback. Even while modeling, making topology changes, and tweaking edge loops, Visualizer was able to deliver several frames per second on just the CPU. And if you add in a Caustic R2100 or R2500 RTU, performance is improved even more without being limited by GPU memory. (Caustic coined the term RTU, or Ray Tracing Unit, to distinguish the product from a GPU.) On an Ace hardware TV spot, I was able to match the lighting and prep the render in a fraction of the time it would have taken through a regular trial-and-error iterative rendering approach or even using a GPU preview. Visualizer changes the way you work. You're no longer hunting and pecking, trying to guess the perfect lighting setup; you're simply seeing it play out in front of you in real time and are able to respond to it intuitively as an artist. Visualizer and a Caustic card nearly paid for themselves just in time savings on my first project. I also like that Visualizer doesn't lock me into using proprietary lights and materials. If you find yourself in need of some feature that only Mental Ray can deliver, continued on page 63 ❱❱❱ CG W July / August 2013 ■ 61