by John Swanson

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Product Title: "Rendering with Mental Ray in Max 2010 "
Author: i3DJack (Leonard Gonzalez)
Level: Beginner/Intermediate
Overall Running Time: 6 hours
For Pricing and to Purchace: i3DTutorials website

From site:
"...This training product is designed for anyone who needs to learn about rendering with 3dsMax and the Mental Ray renderer. Start mastering the art of rendering with the industry standard mental ray renderer, and learn to leverage its powerful lighting features and tools, such as Global Illumination, Final Gather, area lights, Caustics, mental ray daylight systems, as well as new features that have been introduced with 3ds Max 2010. Not only does this product show you how to get started using these features, you will also be taken through the process of applying these features to real world examples. This approach to learning mental ray will maximize your ability to use the renderer from a professional working stand point, teaching you techniques for trouble shooting all kinds of challenges and issues that can occur when working for your studio and clients. This training product includes all project files and assets needed to follow along with the instructor. Project files require Autodesk 3ds Max 2010 and up..."

Let's say you are new to Max 2010 and you have been spending some quality time with the program. You put in the time modeling, working with textures, having a great time with UVWs, etc., perhaps even making some scanline renderings of your work. You say you heard great things about Mental Ray so you set it up as your renderer in the render set up dialogue. Open your scene, set up some lights, press the render button and.... nothing.

In the next few paragraphs I will explain why I feel that downloading "Rendering with Mental Ray in Max 2010" would help you get the most out of this very powerful renderer. I3Dtutorials is an Autodesk Authorized Publisher. I like this training product. I like the instructors style, i3dJack knows how to clearly show you how to set up MR to get the best results. Right out the gate in Chapter 2 he shows us how to change the UI, set up the project file so we can follow along, and finally how to set MR up as the renderer. One thing I would like to note here - he consistently kept the entire set of unused rollouts closed throughout this training. I have not come across this before in any of the training I havve seen. It may not seem like a big deal, but I did find it made a big difference. Both Max and MR can appear very confusing to the novice when many of the rollouts are exposed. I think closing most of them was a good strategy making it easier to follow along. You always know where he is working in the Command panel and dialogue boxes.

This video training consists five separate chapters - each one covering a different aspect of Mental Ray. The sequence of the topics follows a logical order. These topics are accessed through an intuitive, attractive user interface. Open a chapter to view the topics. Clicking a thumbnail picture of each topic's content that scroll by on a carrousel opens the separate topics. Once the video is started you have the usual transport and volume controls at the bottom of the screen. The video itself is recorded clearly and in sharp focus. Throughout the training the i3d robot's head pops up on screen to reinforce an important point that was just made with a brief text message. I didn't find it intrusive so let's just say it was a nice touch.

Next we open a scene filled with primitives on a plane so i3dJack can start showing us the different parts of MR such as the Render Frame Window. To his credit he gives us any keyboard shortcuts that are available for a command. When I learn a new term in Max while reviewing these training products I like to mention it. Iterative rendering. Now I know what iterative rendering is.

We are given a quick tour of the Mental Ray area in the Rendering Setup Dialogue box. By going rollout by rollout he is removing any fears a novice may have when viewing the MR interface for the first time. This was well done in my opinion.

Although it is not strictly MR related I think the instruction on global lights and the Environment Dialogue box was illuminating. Same is true with i3DJack's review of all the Max standards lights. I was surprised that there was no mention of the Max default lights being automatically turned off when any other lights are used in Max. To be fair, it would be impossible to cover every detail, I guess that's just one of the few I noticed. These lessons are obviously carefully prepared before they are recorded, but i3DJack's authoritative but casual way of presenting the material has a way of keeping your attention.

When showing us the use photometric lights he was getting a blown out scene while adjusting their parameters. Before doing the write up on this training video I wanted to know why his scene was not modeled to scale - it was very small. So I emailed i3DJack and got a response within hours. I was pleased that he answered so quickly. Part of his email is reprinted here:

...(in)regards to distances and scale, yes, mental ray does take this into account and it does make a very big difference in both accuracy and performance. In my professional experience working on commercial projects, I have found that it is often more practical to render scenes at a smaller physical scale. The reason for this is practicality; when making photo-real renders you usually work with area shadows and more complex lighting that requires lots of sampling to look "good". For example, if you were to take a rectangular (mental ray) area light and make its size, say, 6'x3' for a large building or something, it would take a lot more samples for the shadows to render correctly than an identical window that is maybe half that size or smaller. Area shadows is just one example of how a feature in mental ray can greatly affect rendering performance (talking mainly speed here) when size comes into play. It really depends on the project, the client deadline, etc. that will dictate which route needs to be taken by the 3d artist at work. .
Essentially you are totally right; but in real world work one finds themselves having to balance lighting accuracy and speed for the sake of finishing a big job on time. I hope that clears things up in regards to your question; I believe I mention in all my mental ray training that scale is important and I speak about how size (particularly with shadow sampling) can affect render speed and accuracy...

This little exchange shows to me that i3DTutorials.com and those connected to it are the real deal. Leonard Gonzalez's knowledge and experience shows throughout his entire response. It provides us with a reminder of coping with deadlines in the professional world. If it looks right it is right. I must say that the renderings he gets in the exercises found in this tutorial do look mighty good.

The section where we are shown the MR lights was very good. I saw the sky portal being used on it's own for the first time ever. I always thought that this was only used in conjunction with a Max skylight, IES or MR or just plain max variety. I thought of it as a way of focusing the photons of a light, directing them to where they are needed most. But I'll be darned - i3dJack gets it to work all on its own. To me this just reinforces the fact that Max is indeed a very versatile program. You just need someone to help you think outside the box. Brilliant!

The viewport configuration topic is an important one. Here we are led through the set up in the Viewport Configuration tab so we get the best performance in our VPs.

You'll learn all about the setting of all the different parameters available in the Global Illumination tab in the Rendering Setup Dialogue. We find a lot of good, useful info on setting up these fields. He makes what could be a very confusing interface very easy to understand. The use of automatic mode is explored here. I appreciated the fact that we are told what numbers were the most important to address to get good results. This training seems to stress good results in the least amount of time - that works for me. After a good explanation of gamma correction in Max and why we should use it we continue to tweak the apartment scene we've been using. We end up with pretty good results, but we have just been set up to see what MRs other tools can do for our render.

I like the way Final gather is introduced. We see it used by itself with no GI used. With manual tweaking we arrive a t good results. The different strategies for animation or stills are covered in this section. I must tell you that i3DJack's coverage of Global illumination and Final Gather disk caching and all the different permutations in this Indirect Illumination rollout is one of the best I've come across. The student should come away with information necessary to use this powerful time saver.

The sections that used the cityscape as the demo scene were packed with solid information. Whether we are shown tone mapping or photon mapping, we end up with knowledge we can put to good use. For the novice, using the daylight system can be very intimidating. Not after this training, the settings here are completely gone over. The Mental Ray sky's parameters are explained from how to make it appear in the render to how to add a touch of reality using haze.

Getting good caustic lighting results are not easy. It almost seems like Max makes you jump through too many hoops to get caustic to operate. I3DJack takes us through all the preliminary settings that must be attended to before we start tweaking the render. We end up with believable caustics generated by a clear glass vase in a simple scene.

I started off this review by saying I think anyone looking to get involved with Mental Ray in Max should consider getting this product. If you've read this far you will have seen why I think this way. I tried to cover most of the topics covered in this product in this review. I'm sure I missed mentioning a few of them. This is a very comprehensive tutorial on Mental Ray. It will give the beginner a good foundation on which to build his or her knowledge of Mental Ray. It would even give someone, like myself, who has used the MR renderer for a while now some new ideas on ways to set up Mental Ray.

Overview of the Chapters and content

Video Breakdown

Chapter 1
Intro

Chapter 2
01 Overview
02 Getting Started
03 mental ray Settings
04 3ds Max Lights
05 Photometric Lights
06 mental ray Lights
07 Viewport Rendering

Chapter 3 08 Global Illumination Part 01
09 Global Illumination Part 02
10 Global Illumination Part 03
11 Global Illumination Part 04
12 GI Example Part 01
13 GI Example Part 02
14 GI Example Part 03

Chapter 4
15 Final Gather Part 01
16 Final Gather Part 02
17 Final Gather Part 03
18 Final Gather Part 04
19 Sun and Sky Part 01
20 Sun and Sky Part 02
21 GI and FG

Chapter 5
22 Caustics Part 01
23 Caustics Part 02
24 Conclusion

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