Mental Ray, Raycasting, Textures, Maya & Unity

Maya is diverse, but you can make scenes that look just as good in most of the other 3d packages (modo, max, softimage, lightwave, houdini, etc) out there, it all depends on your skill and what you feel comfortable with.
I am a Maya user, but from what I hear many of the other options are quite a bit easier to learn than Maya, and capable of the same. Even Blender is capable of photorealism in the hands of a skilled artist.

As far as it goes for moving your Maya scene into Unity, I can't say for sure as I work with UDK, but I would guess that you just need to bake your textures before importing them onto your models. Same as most other workflows out there.

The important thing to realize is that whatever you are building will have inherent restrictions based on the limitations of your engine, as well as the limitations of your target users hardware/software. If a developer really wanted to, they could make games that look near-perfect 1:1 copies of the real world, but it would take a lot of work ($$$) and how well could people run it?

The future is bright my friend!

8-)

Thank you for the reply. I've actually been wondering about UDK. If I'm familiar with Unity already, would it be worth switching? I've heard that UDK is much much much better at lighting than Unity. If the work flow is similar then I may consider switching.

Quick note; I'm in the business of building virtual space for showcasing interior design. Ideally I'd like to be able to make as realistic of an interior as possible, even with dynamic (non-baked) lighting. I understand this will be hard going from Maya to Unity as Unity doesn't support mental ray. Does UDK support mental ray?

Your questions about mental ray make me think you might be misunderstanding what mental ray support means. Both unity and UDK use entirely different methods for rendering than mental ray does, so no matter what, what you render in maya with mental ray will look quite a bit different than what you render in realtime with unity or udk. What I'm thinking your artist is probably talking about specifically is if he has to rebuild his materials once he imports it into unity and udk and the answer to that is almost always going to be yes no matter what game engine you use. Even with default shaders you use in maya it's usually best not to rely on maya to define your material properties anyway, as import support for those materials is as good a hack as the engine devs could make, but still a hack.

With Unity vs UDK, I would stick with what you know. In my experience UDK will generally produce better visual results more quickly for anyone that knows how to use it, but Unity can look just as good if you learn how to modify it to do so. Generally I recommend new users to unity as their community is more newb friendly, the asset store can get you up in running more quickly, and it's easier to experiment with.

TLDR: Mental ray material properties are not transferred over. Your artist should always assume he will have to rebuild his material in Unity or UDK. Probably stick with Unity.

Ok I think I understand what you're saying. I understand that the lighting and shaders can't be directly replicated into Unity from Maya. I didn't realize that held true for all game development engines, so that is good to know.

That does not necessarily mean you can't achieve the same effect though right? Would it even be worth baking the lights and shades onto the materials before exporting from Maya? Or should I just strictly count on having to reproduce all the lights and shaders in Unity?

I feel like I'm kind of going in circles with these questions, and I apologize. I'm better at building models and terrains than I am dealing with lighting and materials. I was hoping there would be a simpler way of importing assets from Maya so I wouldn't have to mess with those things.