Having a solid understanding of the features of mental ray is a crucial step toward becoming an efficient and productive rendering artist in Softimage. We will begin our tutorial by learning several methods for simulating realistic indirect lighting in Softimage, such as global illumination, final gather, as well as Importons and Irradiance Particles. We will also explore the use of caustics to simulate the light patterns created as light passes through refractive surfaces. In addition, we will also explore Image-based lighting techniques, camera and environment shaders, utilizing render passes and render channels, as well as many other tools and techniques that will allow you start rendering high quality work for a multitude of projects.

In the world around us, much of the light that we perceive comes from indirect illumination, or light that bounces off other surfaces to illuminate our surroundings. One of the ways that mental ray allows us to incorporate realistic light bouncing into our rendered images is to use global illumination. We will begin this course by learning about the underlying principles of global illumination, and how it relies on photons to calculate the lighting result. From there, we will learn how to adjust photon emission values, incorporating final gather into our global illumination results, saving and re-using global illumination data, override rendered photon results using the render tree, and many other lessons dedicated to explaining the various features and parameters used to control the global illumination result. By the time you complete this course, you will have a much stronger understanding of the underlying principles of global illumination, as well as a better understanding of some the common global illumination pitfalls, limitations, and their solutions.

In the world around us, much of the light that we perceive comes from indirect illumination, or light that bounces off other surfaces to illuminate our surroundings. One of the ways that mental ray allows us to incorporate realistic light bouncing into our rendered images is to use Final Gathering. We will begin this course by learning about the underlying principles of Final Gathering, and how it calculates an indirect lighting result. From there, we will learn how to adjust Final Gather quality settings, how to reduce the amount of Final Gather flickering seen in animations, as well as many other lessons dedicated to explaining the various features and parameters used to control the Final Gather result. By the time you complete this course, you will have a much stronger understanding of the underlying principles of Final Gather, as well as a better understanding of some the common Final Gathering pitfalls, and their solutions.

We'll begin our tutorial by learning how to use global illumination, final gather, and the new Irradiance Particles as well as importons so that you can easily simulate the effects of indirect lighting and quickly render highly realistic scenes. We'll also spend some time going over how you can dramatically increase your rendering speed by saving and re-using indirect illumination data, giving you more time to focus on the creative aspect of the image. We'll also explore how you can use caustics to simulate the light patterns that are created when light passes through refractive surfaces. Then, we'll then take time to explore several specialized mental ray shaders like the architectural materials, subsurface scattering, and ambient occlusion shaders, as well as learn how we can use Render Passes and Render Channels to split our renders into multiple passes for compositing purposes.

In this series of lessons we will discuss a variety of tools and workflows to help improve speed and stability when attempting to render heavy, resource-intensive scenes within mental ray. We will explore several methods for conserving system resources, such as using the command-line to render your scenes outside of Maya, using mental ray render proxies to minimize the amount of memory consumed by your scene files, how to render high resolution images into separate smaller tiles, as well as several other workflows for improving performance and stability within mental ray. Using these workflows, we will be able to dedicate more of our system resources to the rendering of our scene files, and significantly reduce the frequency of any crashing we may experience.

Popular highlights include: Overview of mental ray; Global Illumination; Emitting GI Photons from Light Sources; Photon Energy and Decay Parameters; Final Gather; Controlling Final Gather Accuracy; Adding Secondary Final Gather Bounces; Mixing Final Gather and Global Illumination; Saving and Reusing Lighting Data; Importons; Irradiance Particles; Portal Lights; Image-based Lighting; HDR Exposure Controls; Caustics; Emitting Caustic Photons from Lights; Subsurface Scattering Shader; Ambient Occlusion Shader; mental ray Architectural Materials; Render Passes for Multi-pass Rendering; Creating Pass Contribution Maps.

Popular highlights include: mental ray Overview; Global Illumination Workflow; Final Gather Workflow; Caustics Workflow; Emitting GI Photons from Light Sources; Photon Energy and Decay Parameters; Controlling Final Gather Accuracy; Adding Secondary Final Gather Bounces; Mixing Final Gather and Global Illumination; Saving and Reusing Lighting Data; Image-based Lighting; HDR Exposure Controls; Emitting Caustic Photons from Lights; Optimizing Caustic Photon Use; Subsurface Scattering Shader; Ambient Occlusion Shader; mental ray Architectural Material; Utilizing the Material Editor; Contour Line Rendering; Using Render Elements; Scene States; Compositing Rendered Passes.

Popular highlights include: Overview of essential subsurface scattering attributes; Connecting lightmaps to subsurface shaders; Understanding forward and backward scattering; Using bump and normal maps with subsurface shaders; Properly controlling light interaction with translucent surfaces; Controlling scatter bias; Adjusting lightmap's Diffuse Gamma Curve; Adding separate specular/reflection attributes to SSS shaders; Using SSS with final gather; Using textures to drive SSS attributes; Using the Physical SSS shader; Controlling photon interactions with Physical SSS; Absorption and scattering coefficients.

Popular highlights include: Understanding Caustic Photons; Emitting Photons from Various Light Sources; Controlling Photon Energy and Decay Rates; Altering Photon Color Attributes; Separating Caustics from Direct Lighting; Tuning Caustic Scale, Radius, and Accuracy; Photon Tracing with Transparent Surfaces; Saving and Re-using Caustic Photons Maps; Dielectric Material Properties; Troubleshooting Rendering Errors; Using the Map Visualizer; Photon Interactions with Maya Materials; Photon Interactions with mental ray Materials.

Popular highlights include: Global Illumination Overview; Understanding Photons in mental ray; Emitting Photons from Various Light Sources; Controlling Photon Energy; Controlling Decay Rates; Altering Photon Color Attributes; Separating the Effects of Direct Lighting; Separating the Effects of Indirect Lighting; Tuning Global Illumination Scale; Tuning Global Illumination Radius; Tuning Global Illumination Accuracy; Photon Tracing with Transparent Surfaces; Global Illumination Photons Maps; Global Illumination with Final Gather; Using the Map Visualizer; Global Illumination Overrides; Photon Interaction with Maya Materials; Photon Interaction with mental ray Materials.

Popular highlights include: Storing / Reusing Global Illumination Photon Maps; Storing / Reusing Final Gather Maps; BSP Diagnostics; mental ray Render Diagnostics; Render Layers; Layer Overrides; Custom MEL Scripts for Attribute Adjustment; Converting to .MAP format; Controlling Final Gather Light Intensity; Compositing Render Layers in External Applications; Depth Passes for Depth-of-Field Effects; Motion Vector Passes; Optimizing mental ray Memory Usage.