Welcome!

Want to learn to write mental ray^® shaders? Develop mental ray shader networks (Phenomena)? Or just use mental ray effectively? We have training classes targeted for artists, TDs, and programmers in the Winter, Spring and Fall. Using mental ray is a 1-day class series. We also have a series of look-oriented, shader-specific 1-day classes for artists. Performance Optimization is a new 2-day class. Shader Network Design, and Writing mental ray Shaders are 3-day classes. Classes now being held at The Academy of Entertainment and Technology at Santa Monica College in LA, 10AM-6PM. We also do frequent on-site classes, and get booked up quite far in advance.

Winter 2012

New training class location The Artist Track mental ray training classes will be given January 9-13 at The Academy of Entertainment and Technology at Santa Monica College. The classes are tuned for Autodesk 2012 products, and if you are working with Maya 2012, we have some advanced rendering scripts for artists as well. Check out the Training Classes on the left.

Unified Sampling If you use motion blur in production, with complex effects, and want to retaing the high quality of ray tracing, please check out various resources on Unified Sampling (which we will also cover in artist class 103 - Antialiasing and Motion blur, Performance Optimization for artists, Wed. Jan 11). In particular, see the blog at elementalray.wordpress.com. Also, check out the mental ray forum.

Other News

Get involved! After cruising the mental ray forum , consider creating some nice renders for the Gallery section.