Tutorial: Mental Ray Sampling Quality (Anti-Aliasing)

[EricMLevy]

If you can wrap your head around this stuff, your renders will be FASTER and LOOK BETTER and that’s what it’s all about! You have to find the balance between really smooth renders and going overboard. Using these ideas, you can LITERALLY trim HOURS from your renders.

We’re talking about the difference between jaggy and smooth-lined renders:

UGLY (Fast render)

NOT UGLY (Slow render)

(more…)

[EricMLevy]

Hi all,

 

I've updated this tutorial, so it's written in a way that you might actually understand.

The version I had up there before wasn't as friendly as I prefer, so I re-wrote it. The above link still works.

 

Enjoy!

 

Sample:

The tutorial presents a method to simplify the sampling / anti-aliasing settings in Mental Ray to the point that you can use the Spatial Contrast number to control the ‘Speed vs. Quality’ of your renders. It is most closely related to Christopher Nichols’ anti-aliasing method for V-Ray, “Speed vs Quality in V-Ray,” but was developed independently from that, using countless websites and hours of testing. If you’re also a V-Ray user, I suggest shelling out the seven bucks for Nichol’s tutorial.

 

This method mitigates the time spent rendering an image with smooth, anti-aliased lines.