Rendering with mental ray and 3ds Max, 2nd Edition

5.3 Volume shaders

So far you’ve learned to apply shaders that affect the materials or surfaces of objects in the scene. This might be one of the most common uses of shaders in mental ray for your day-to-day work, but let’s look at other types of shaders called volume shaders. As the name suggests, these shaders create a volume effect within the confines of an object or as an atmospheric effect such as mist or halos around bright lights.

In this section you will look at a couple of different volume shaders:

•  Submerge

•  Parti Volume

The Submerge shader will be useful for our previous exercise with the buoy in the water. Generally, water is not quite as clear as it appears in the scene with the buoy, but because of suspended particles in the ...