3ds Max 2012 Bible - Kelly L. Murdock [493]
Working with iray
After iray is enabled, you'll notice that the number of panels for configuring it in the Render Setup dialog box has been greatly reduced. The whole idea behind iray is to make the process of configuring the renderer easier. The single configuration panel for iray is the Renderer panel, shown in Figure 47.1.
FIGURE 47.1
The iray renderer has only a single panel of options in the Render Setup dialog box.
Within iray's Renderer panel, you can set the time for the render to take, choose the number of iterations, or make simply set enable the Unlimited option. The iray renderer then renders and continually refines the given scene. As it renders, the results are shown in the Rendered Frame Window, and the render can be stopped and saved at any time.
The Advanced Parameters rollout includes options for limiting the number of light bounces, options for picking the anti-aliasing filter to use (Box, Gauss, or Triangle), and global settings for handling displacement maps. The Material Override option lets you replace all applied materials with a single designated material that is selected using the button to the right. This lets you see the lighting and shadow effects quickly or get a result if unsupported materials are used in the scene.
One “gotcha” when working with iray is that if a material or map is used that it doesn't support, the object is rendered as flat gray. The supported iray materials are those that have information on how the light interacts with it. For Max, the Arch & Design materials, the Autodesk Material Library (except for the Metallic Paint material, which isn't supported), Bitmaps, Mix, Noise, Normal Bump, RGB Multiply, and mr Physical Sky are supported. Also, iray supports only Photometric lights.
Figure 47.2 shows a sample scene rendered with iray. The image on the left shows the scene after only a few seconds, and the one on the right shows the scene after a longer render time.
FIGURE 47.2
The iray renderer progressively refines the image for as long as you let it run.
Tutorial: Starting iray
Once you get the hang of using iray, you'll find it is great to start the renderer with the unlimited setting before running off to lunch and check out the results when you get back.
To use the iray renderer to render a scene, follow these steps:
1. Open the Plant in corner.max file from the Chap 47 directory on the CD.
This file includes several simple objects and a plant. The scene already has materials applied from the Autodesk Material Library.
2. Open the Render Scene dialog box (F10), and switch the Production Renderer in the Assign Renderer rollout of the Common panel to the iray renderer.
3. In the Renderer panel of the Render Setup dialog box, enable the Unlimited option and click the Render button.
4. Let the scene render for a while and when it looks good enough, click the Cancel button in the Rendering dialog box. The rendered results are displayed in the Rendered Frame Window where you can save the image if you desire.
Figure 47.3 shows the scene rendered with iray.
FIGURE 47.3
Using the Unlimited option lets the iray renderer keep running as long as it can.
Accessing mental ray Preferences
In the Preference Settings dialog box is a panel of global mental ray settings, shown in Figure 47.4. In this panel, you can select to Enable mental ray Extensions. These extensions add some additional controls to several of the various mental ray panels.
When the Scanline Renderer renders a scene, it progresses one line of pixels at a time down the image, but mental ray renders the image by breaking it up into blocks and rendering a block at a time. The Show Brackets on Current