AJLynn Posted January 23, 2006 Share Posted January 23, 2006 ... and the tutorials are not very complete, all those huge books on Max are even less useful and that book on mental ray that was linked here a few weeks back looks like it's aimed a bit over the level I'm looking for. Can anybody point me at a good book or set of practical tutorials? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manta Posted January 23, 2006 Share Posted January 23, 2006 That is exactly why I went for vray (along time ago) because I could never find out HOW to use MR, you would think if they wanted people to use it they would have stuff out there... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted January 23, 2006 Author Share Posted January 23, 2006 I started using Vray for the same reason, but it's pretty inconvenient - I don't have the full version on this computer. Still, I'm going through mental ray now, knowing what I know about Vray, and I think it's helping a lot - before I was trying to use it based on what I knew from the Max tutorials and hitting a wall. Now I'm looking at those old scene files, done with the methods in the tutorials and realizing how dumb I was being. I just redid a render that took a few hours before with final gather, takes a few minutes with photon map only and the light intensities, energy and decay set up correctly. The photon system seems a lot more powerful than I gave it credit for, there are shaders for literally everything - I could see this becoming my new favorite renderer if I could really learn it. I wonder if a better way to learn mental ray isn't to download the Vray demo, learn that pretty well, then do the mental ray tutorials keeping in mind that much of it is crap. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bokkins Posted January 23, 2006 Share Posted January 23, 2006 its really difficult to learn it at first, but if you get the hang of it, it will be fine, I tried it also, but I stopd since it really takes a lot of time rendering it, specially with final gather. but there's one thing I love about MR, ambient occlusion. makes things faster... evermotion and 3dpalace have a few tuts on this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aksel Posted January 23, 2006 Share Posted January 23, 2006 i would still recommend the book mentioned above though. it's pretty straight forward and a little scientificly dry, but i like that far better than those mtv-like tutorials out there. every chapter works something like this: introduction on the matter (i.e. FG) in easy words every person even outside 3d understands. then the chapter goes into details pretty fast, you find things which are of interest. they as well got explanations of the scene language in there, thats why the book looks a little scary flipping it through, but you can skip these parts. hope that helps, a. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3dp Posted January 23, 2006 Share Posted January 23, 2006 rather than wading through books and i'd been a mental ray user years ago on softimage i wanted to get back to speed on max as when it comes to special effects work it imho leaves the architect friendly vray for dead here are some links to get you moving http://jeffpatton.net/index.html just download the scenes and take it on board and here for lots of tasty nuggets of info i also got the mentalray 4 ever dvd off evermotion it's for max6 but still works on later versions have fun Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jophus14 Posted January 23, 2006 Share Posted January 23, 2006 I bought the video from 3dquaker and i feel that i was quite useful. I'm not sure how much you know already, but it helped me out. You should check it out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted January 24, 2006 Author Share Posted January 24, 2006 Thanks guys. Question for Aksel or anybody else who has the book: is it Maya or XSI centric, or is it also useful for Max? (I'm not sure how different/similar mr is across platforms.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aksel Posted January 24, 2006 Share Posted January 24, 2006 Thanks guys. Question for Aksel or anybody else who has the book: is it Maya or XSI centric, or is it also useful for Max? (I'm not sure how different/similar mr is across platforms.) It's not centric to any 3d software, as it's not about UI or tutorials in any way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted January 27, 2006 Author Share Posted January 27, 2006 Useful link I got from Doron: http://euqahuba.com/stuff/mr_prime/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aksel Posted January 27, 2006 Share Posted January 27, 2006 i would recommend to use this one with care. just two examples: - even on high and ultra, the presets use heavy image undersampling. you should not do this for high quality and certainly not for ultra - the lights are using various mr-shadowmap settings for optimization. it is known that raytraced shadows are in most cases *much* faster then shadow maps in mental ray. try to pick a preset, render, note time, go into the light manually and switch shadows to raytrace and repeat - you will see the rendertime drops by a huge chunk... a. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted January 27, 2006 Author Share Posted January 27, 2006 Yeah, I wouldn't want something like this for real stuff - there are some obvious problems with it - but it's pretty cool being able to do quick renders without having to do any work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nisus Posted May 16, 2006 Share Posted May 16, 2006 i would still recommend the book mentioned above though. it's pretty straight forward and a little scientificly dry, but i like that far better than those mtv-like tutorials out there. What book mentioned above? (I don't see a book mentioned above...) rgds, nisus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Hunt Posted May 16, 2006 Share Posted May 16, 2006 The thing that I found most helpful in learning MR was , Treat it just like scanline in your lighting setup and materials, once you are comfortable with that experiment with AO. FG and photons are alot easier than you thing and the help file will give you a good start. Experiment, experiment, experiment JHV Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
antonio_frias Posted May 17, 2006 Share Posted May 17, 2006 Have you tried ArchiCD? http://www.3dtotal.com/services/archiCD/achiCD_01.asp Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nisus Posted May 17, 2006 Share Posted May 17, 2006 Interesting. Have you tried the cd? How much time is spend on the lighting compared to the modelling part? rgds, nisus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bigroo Posted May 17, 2006 Share Posted May 17, 2006 You could try http://www.theqball.com/tutorials/mr-exterior/ from Shane Griffith on this forum. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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