3ds Max 2012 Bible - Kelly L. Murdock [498]
FIGURE 47.14
When mental ray is rendered in the Render Frame Window, a panel of options appears below for tweaking the image.
FIGURE 47.15
Placing the Glare map in the Output Camera Shader, you can get a strong glare from the light in the window.
Using mental ray proxies
Complex scenes can have hundreds of objects and when rendered in mental ray, single frames can take several hours to render. This can make it tough to get previews to test lighting and atmospheric effects. If you know that the objects look fine, then you can use the mental ray proxy object to replace multiple objects or a single high-resolution object with a proxy.
To use a mental ray proxy object, add a mr proxy object to the scene using the Create⇒mental ray⇒mr Proxy menu command. Select the Modify panel and click on the Source Object button, then select the object that you want to replace with the proxy.
Note
You can only select the source object in the Modify panel. •
When the source object is selected, you can save the object to a file. Source objects are saved as .mib files. The object is then displayed within the scene as a point cloud or as a bounding box, and a preview of the source object is displayed in the Parameters rollout. You also can change the number of vertices that are displayed in the viewports.
When the scene is rendered, the source object file is read in and used for the render.
Summary
If you're looking for a rendering option that perfectly calculates reflections, refractions, and transparencies, then the mental ray renderer is what you need. iray is another option for rendering when you aren't sure how to configure mental ray.
In this chapter, you accomplished the following:
• Learned to enable the mental ray and iray renderers
• Used the iray renderer to progressively render complex scenes
• Created mental ray lights
• Worked with caustics and photons
• Used mental ray proxies
Now that I've told you how to overload the rendering engine, the next chapter offers a way to get some help by batch rendering and rendering over the network.
Chapter 48: Batch and Network Rendering
IN THIS CHAPTER
Setting up batch rendering
Using network rendering
Rendering on a network
Using network rendering servers
Logging errors
Using the Monitor
Event notification
Max can help you create some incredible images and animations, but that power comes at a significant price—time. Modeling scenes and animation sequences takes enough time on its own, but after you're finished, you still have to wait for the rendering to take place, which for a final rendering at the highest detail settings can literally take days. Because the time rendering takes is directly proportional to the amount of processing power you have access to, Max lets you use network rendering to add more hardware to the equation and speed up those painfully slow jobs.
This chapter shows you how to set up Max to distribute the rendering workload across an entire network of computers, helping you finish big rendering jobs in record time.
Batch Rendering Scenes
If you work all day modeling, texturing, and animating sequences, only to find that most of your day is shot waiting for a sequence to be rendered, then happily you have several solutions. You can get a second system and use it for rendering while you work on the first system, you can use the network rendering feature to render over the network, or you have a third possibility: you can use the Batch Render tool.
Unless you are working around the clock (which is common for many game productions), you can set up a batch rendering queue before you leave for the evening, using the Batch Render tool. This queue runs through the night, giving you a set of takes to review in the morning.
Using the Batch Render tool
The Batch Render window, shown in Figure 48.1, is accessed from