3ds Max® 2012 Bible

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 ...