Resources

A place for useful mental ray^® information. For your feedback or questions, at the bottom of each html resource page, we have a cross link to a topic in the forum.

Dave Levy from The Mill sent us his notes on how to setup mental ray standalone for rendering Maya files. It's definitely useful for those of you going between operating systems, and rendering to mental ray standalone across vendors.

Bart has a recap of Vol.1 Filename Rewriting, and how to setup MI_RAY_SUBSTITUTE when creating mi files from 3D apps on Windows PCs to be rendered on Linux based standalone mr procs.

Rayhosts and mental ray servers. Also, in part from Vol.1 Filename Rewriting, Bart talks about setting up .rayhosts and .rayrc to use servers. Adding notes on using them from Maya.

After a fresh installation, does mental ray standalone hang? Here's how to track down the problem

Connecting to streaming output tiles, using the stub image. Did you know that the 128-byte stub written out in place of your image at the beginning of a render has lots of useful information? Thomas suggested we put this doc in our resources, since people were having a hard time tracking it down.

Charlotte Manning's options notes

Jim Rothrock has submitted his default options settings

Diagrams with tips to help you visualize the numbers you choose for the samples option. This is also helpful for those working with user framebuffers, and multipass rendering, which deals with samples based operation. The first of a series of three related tips pages.

The second in the series, a similarly strucured tips page with diagrams to help you visualize how to use motion blur effectively.

The third in the series demystifies the rasterizer, the new name for the Rapid Motion scanline algorithm.

Work in Progress Memory Usage Understanding memory and the scene cache

Placeholders Using placeholders to create demand-loaded objects

mi syntax overview - anatomy of an mi scene file

Work in progress. Indirect Illumination is the starting point for understanding FG, GI, AO, etc. This is the first in a series which will include the long-awaited tips for each of these techniques.

Coming soon!Finalgathering Explanation of the Final Gathering indirect illumination technique.

Coming soon!Global Illumination Explanation of the photon tracing technique

Coming soon!Caustics Explanation of this special category of photon tracing and how to use it with FG

On a discussion on the mentalray mailing list, Jim Rothrock summarized an excellent methodology for addressing flicker in combination with Final Gathering and Global Illumination. The key if you mix the two is to tune each separately. Also, since this was during version 3.3, the FG accuracy parameters can be cut in half.

LAmrUG Final Gathering/Ambient Occlusion, Part 1 from March 2005

LAmrUG Final Gathering/Ambient Occlusion, Part 2 from April 2005

LAXSIUG Final Gathering, from June 2005

Paolo Berto's Occlusion Tutorial, distributed with mental ray

Overview on subsurface scattering for version 3.3 and up

Physically based subsurface scattering tips

Subsurface scattering tutorial using the physical shaders. Tutorials (3.1M pdf) and supporting files (8.8M zip) prepared by Paolo Berto of mental images. Includes both the dragon and the milk tutorial.

Non-physical (skin) subsurface scattering tips

Subsurface scattering tutorial using the non-physical skin shaders. Tutorial (1.5M pdf) and supporting files (3.7M zip) prepared by the author of the shaders, 'Zap' Andersson of mental images.

New! Car paint shaders Trick out your autos with the new paint shaders

How to make user framebuffers to enable renders with multiple layers. Requires some shader writing.

Maya 6 binary scene file (<900K .mb) to go along with the skin tutorial files. It demonstrates what you should get as a result of following the tutorial. Requires relinking all the textures supplied with the SSS skin files (3.7M).

Jan Walter from The Mill, Digital Domain, and now mental images, sent us a link to a course he's preparing on shader writing. It's a good reference for comparing terminology across renderers. He tells me the second part of the course will concentrate much more on mental ray, once the students get through the overview.

Adding transparency to hair using mib_illum_hair

Here's an important note if you want to use the hair primitive from a geometry shader with a placeholder callback.

More details and code listings for geofeather.

Namespace and geometry shaders