mental ray settings

[Scatterface]

hi all,

I was wondering what settings people use for mental ray in 3Ds Max? I have gotten rather comfortable with an IES sun/sky light combo, but after talking some with The Allusionist I'm wondering what other setting are out there that yield great results. Anyone mind sharing some settings? Final gather, GI, caustics, bucket size, exposure control ect....



thanks

[Russell L. Thomas]

Hey buddy, I moved your thread into the mental ray forums, we could bump it into the Max mental ray category, but a lot of the answers for this will be compatible with the three major programs using mr. Make sure to read the other threads in here and feel free to participate in the threads.

[inflames]

Hi Scatterface, let's go straight to business,
i'm an architect so i keep my works based on arch visualization.

I've been using daylight system since i remember, it's easy to set up
and as a starting point couldn't be better.
Along with daylight system i usually set these parameters on:

- FG, most of the times on low/,medium preset,
it gives good results with short render time.
I rarely use a high preset, it bumps render time too much and the quality improvement doesn't payoff...
use it only on final renders;
- GI, i usually start with a low photon value and start increasing to something like 200/300 thousand photons in the end,
it depends on your geometry so it's a bit variable;
- I haven't used caustics yet, it's very specific;
- i usualy set my final renders to 2048 px,
when testing materials and lighting i stick to under 640px;
- i decreased the spatial contrast default values (0,05 on every RGBA channels)
to a lower value like 0,03 or 0,04, for a higher precision, althought render times get bigger as well.
- exposure control, been using mr photographic with variable EV (between 14 and 15)
and tweaked highlights/midtones/shadows, not the default, as suggested by a well known mr master (Jeff Patton);
- i always do some photoshop adjustments like color, contrast and brightness in the end;

Very recently, i started to test HDRI to light my scenes, following some good tutorials out there. Been using these configs:

- a spherical HDRi on the environment map slot for the reflections;
- a blured copy of the same HDRi as a map on a mr Skylight, for the overall lighting;
- last but not least, a mr area spot light to improve the shadows;
- FG is on and GI is off.

I'm actually doing my first test render and it looks more realistic
than the daylight system standard preset i told you before.

Cheers =)

[Scatterface]

Hey, man, thanks for the reply. I'll have to take a look at some of your settings and see how they compare. At the moment I'm doing interior renders and trying to duplicate the natural lighting that the equipment I'm modeling would be housed in.

Thanks for the time taken to write all of that. I'll let you know what I come across.


-Scatterface

[neil]

Some interesting FG Settings I found and it is giving me an excellent result.

Initial FG Point Density - 1
Rays Per FG Points - 100
Interpolate Over Num. FG Points - 10
and others are default.