Review: Mastering Mental ray

(Originally published in 3D Artist Issue 34)

Mastering mental ray: Rendering Techniques for 3D and CAD Professionals

Price. £39.99

Website. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mastering-Mental-Ray-Techniques-Professionals/dp/0470563850

Make rendering less of a chore with this comprehensive, must-have guide to working with mental ray.

This in-depth guide to mental ray explains how to optimize your renders and create production standard photo-realistic imagery, making it essential reading for professional artists seeking to reduce time spent experimenting and test rendering. 3ds Max is used as the host application through-out the book, and a basic working knowledge is advisable. There is minimal superfluous 3ds Max coverage. Intermediate and advanced users will benefit the most, as there’s only a quick look at mental ray setup and fundamental basics such as aliasing and gamma.

Chapters on materials and maps, lighting and shadows including Global Illumination and Photometric Lighting, rendering, effects, Importons and Irradiance Particles all shed light on procedures to develop your renders to a high standard. Two concluding chapters are specifically tailored for architects using Revit assets, and industrial design rendering including post-processing with workflow for 3ds Max Composite.

This book was obviously a labour of love for author, Jennifer O’Connor and her writing style makes it easy to understand both mental ray’s complexities and its abundance of settings. It’s well illustrated through-out with rendered examples in colour, which are mainly arch-vis images or dialog boxes showing settings. The accompanying DVD contains plug-ins, scene files, scripts and additional resources for the step-by-step tutorials.

Summary. It’s an authoritative guide on using mental ray for photo-real design visualisation. Advanced training that will improve your rendering skills and make life easer during production tasks