3ds Max 2012 Bible - Kelly L. Murdock [492]
• Using the Lens Effects to create glows, rays, and stars
• Working with the remaining render effects to control brightness and contrast, film grain, blurs, and more
• Learning how exposure controls can work
The next chapter delves into the amazing mental ray rendering engine.
Chapter 47: Rendering with mental ray and iray
IN THIS CHAPTER
Enabling the mental ray renderer
Working with mental ray lights
Creating caustic and global illumination lighting
Added mental ray proxy
Max includes a plug-in architecture that lets you replace or extend any part of the software including the rendering engine. Mental ray is a plug-in rendering engine that offers many advanced features. This engine takes the rendering in Max to a new level, enabling you to render your scenes with amazing accuracy. It also includes a host of advanced rendering features including caustics and global illumination that are physically realistic.
Although the mental ray renderer is awesome, it can take lots of tweaking to get results to look just right. This is where iray comes in. iray lets you start a render, and it automatically adjusts the settings to give you great results based on the amount of time you give it. In other words, iray is mental ray for dummies.
Enabling mental ray and iray
If you're accustomed to using the Default Scanline Renderer and you're wondering if the mental ray or iray rendering engines are worth using, the answer is yes. Actually, you should try a couple of test renderings first and play with the different settings, but in working with mental ray I've been amazed at its results. One of the chief benefits of mental ray is its speed. It can render a fully raytraced scene in a fraction of the time without sacrificing quality.
Note
If you need even more speed and don't mind sacrificing a little quality, then try the Quicksilver Hardware renderer. It works with most of the mental ray materials, lights, and settings. •
Note
mental ray is an external rendering engine that plugs into 3ds Max. It was developed by a company named mental images, so its development is separate from Max. Versions of the mental ray rendering engine also can be found in Maya and Softimage as well as a stand-alone version. •
mental ray and iray also include support for global illumination without your having to enable the Advanced Lighting settings. In addition, mental ray can use all of Max's existing materials without having to use a limited specialized material like the raytrace material. Each material has a new rollout that lets you specialize mental ray settings. However, iray requires that you use only a specific set of materials, including the Arch & Design and those materials in the Autodesk Material Library.
Note
mental ray can't use the Advanced Lighting settings. mental ray has its own lighting solution that is independent of Advance Lighting. •
Cross-Reference
Many of the available mental ray materials are covered in Chapter 30, “Using Specialized Material Types.” •
mental ray also includes native support for Area Lights, Shaders, Depth of Field, and Motion Blur. It also includes some specialized lights that offer functionality, such as caustics, that are unavailable in the Scanline Renderer.
To choose mental ray or iray as the renderer for your scene, simply select it from the list of available renderers in the Assign Renderer rollout of the Common panel of the Render Scene dialog box. You can set a different renderer for Production, the Material Editor, and the ActiveShade viewer. To make mental ray your default renderer, click the Save as Defaults button in this rollout.
Once selected as your Production renderer, you don't need to modify any other settings for the renderer to work. The mental ray settings in the Material Editor, Lights category, and Object Properties dialog box enable additional features that mental ray can take advantage of, but they aren't required to render the scene. The current mental ray version is 3.9.
Note
You may have noticed the Raytracer rollout in the Render