Rendered all in Bryce 9! (heh) Nope... Just wanted to get some feedback on this image and style from people who might know my past work. I finally got some time on Maya 6 and wanted to share it with you people, since I don't know anyone in the Maya forum yet and I know they'd mock me into submission... The ring was a combination NURBS and poly model, created in Rhino (The blasphemy part, Maya has plenty of capability for modeling a ring like this, I'm just inept and new to it...) Rendered with Mental Ray using Global Illumination, the real, photon-based GI. I fear I won't be going back to "faking" it in Bryce, but will likely use Bryce more than Maya no matter what, because most of my images are Brycean-style at their very core. Also, I don't have as much access to Maya, only at work... But for the eye-candy scenes, I have to say I'm blown away by Maya's capabilities and by the way it clicks with me, as opposed to Lightwave and Cinema 4D and RayDreamStudio, which I slaved on for months without producing a single image worth showing anyone. Been playing with Maya for a few weeks and it's just been a blast... Reminds me of my modeler-hunt. I played with Wings for fifteen or twenty minutes and it drove me to drink, then played with Blender for about 30 seconds, and even te ZBrush demo to no avail. Then I tried the Rhino 1 demo, boom! It just clicked, and I've been using it ever since. I'm still a Bryce renderer, it's so much faster even than Maya to set up a scene with. I wish you could transfer Bryce's User Interface to other apps! But there it is... My first, pathetic Maya render. This image rendered in about 5 minutes, with caustics and GI and photons and ray tracing and blah blah blah blah... Now back to my Bryce scenery-ing!

And the regular old Maya software render, which is actually not even as good as the OpenGL preview you get in the Maya UI. Thanks for bothering to look!

Is it just me or does te real GI thing in not seem to do all that much to this render?

Yeah, you got that right Rayraz... I'm still very new with Maya, and haven't figured out all the crazy tricks it can do. Still, there's a certain clarity in it's renders that I haven't ben able to touch with Bryce as of yet...

This image was a little cooler, but still just rookie at best...

sounds a little like my 3DSMax work lol :P I can get it to render slowly, but I can't get it to render anything that'll look like Radiosity or GI or even raytraced reflections! :|

I had a chance to play in Maya for a bit in version 5. I agree. Other than Bryce it was the easiest out of anything I have tried. If only I had the cash I'd be learning Maya as fast as I could. And yes, I know the have the "educational" version but it is too limited.

Aye, the PLE is useless, I've had it since Unreal Tournament 2004. My employer uses Maya 6 for Windows, finally, and they let me play on it after hours sometimes... Unfortunately I'm just in the marketing department and don't get to do graphics much at work anymore...