3ds Max – mental ray
The video capture with narration below goes through the entire process of setting up 3ds Max for a mental ray render, file linking *fbx geometry, applying materials, artificial lighting, distributed bucket rendering and render settings to produce the following image.
This video is part of a white paper I coauthored for the RTC conference in Sydney earlier this year. This paper goes through the process of rendering in Revit through to 3ds Max where we render the same geometry using both mental ray and V-Ray. If you are interested in a copy of this paper or more information click here.
The Bach: RTC 3ds Max with Vray presentation from Dan Jurgens on Vimeo.
3ds Max 2011 with mental ray datsets
The Bach Max2011 MR Step2 (164) - 29.89 MB
3ds Max material datasets
RTC - 3ds Max materials (123) - 58.27 MB
When you download these 3ds Max scene files and maps you will need to re-path the resources to the where you choose to save these files on your hard drive, the images below go through this process.
In the 3ds Max scene under the application menu, Manage open Asset Tracking. Select the files that you want to set to a new location and under the Paths menu, select Set Path. Browse to the new location of the folder that contains the maps and select use Path. Note: I re-pathed the *fgm file, but when I hit render mental ray started calculating the final gather map again instead of using this saved map!
Open up the render setup dialog box and under the common path select a new location to save the output, and as the final gather map did not work open the Indirect Illumination tab and under the FG caching roll out browse to a suitable location, click Save and then Generate Final Gather Map Now. Mental ray calculates and saves the FG map. Next time you push render you should notice the Reuse Final Gather toggle is on and the render skips the final gather step altogether and begins rendering.
After viewing this video you should have a good overview of the process and the basic settings of mental ray. Now we will look into the specific settings in more detail.
info coming soon…
