2008

IMPORTANT To see the mental ray rollouts for lights, you must use mental ray
Preferences
on page 7579 to enable mental ray extensions. These rollouts appear
only on the Modify panel. They don't appear on the Create panel.
Camera Enhancements
On the
Parameters rollout on page 5123 , a “Depth Of Field (mental ray)” choice
has been added to the Multi-Pass Effect drop-down list to support the mental
ray renderer's depth-of-field effects. To use this, turn on both Enable in the
camera's Multi-Pass Effect group (default=off), and Depth Of Field on the
Render Scene dialog > Renderer panel >
Camera Effects rollout on page 6087 .
You can also assign mental ray lens, output, and volume shaders to cameras.
These controls are also on the Render Scene dialog's Camera Effects rollout.
(This rollout also contains some contour-shading controls.)
NOTE When you use the mental ray renderer, reflected or refracted light rays do
not always respect a camera's clipping planes (set in the Clipping Planes group of
the Parameters rollout). Also, large clipping-plane values can cause poor quality
in the rendering of shadow maps. To fix this, narrow the clipping range or switch
to ray-traced shadows.
Material Editor Enhancements
The Material Editor works as it does with the default scanline renderer. Certain
materials and maps, or some of their controls, aren't supported by the mental
ray renderer; see
3ds Max Materials in mental ray Renderings on page 6048 .
By default, the Material Editor sample slots use the currently active renderer:
typically this is either the default scanline renderer or the mental ray renderer.
As of 3ds Max you assign the renderer for sample slots by using the Render
Scene dialog > Common panel >
Assign Renderer rollout on page 5943 .
When mental ray extensions are enabled (using
mental ray Preferences on
page 7579 ) and the mental ray renderer is active, the Material Editor displays
these additional mental ray features:
■ A mental ray Connection rollout on page 5289 lets you add mental ray
shaders to 3ds Max materials.
■ When you click a material's Type button, the Material/Map Browser displays
additional
mental ray materials on page 5448 .
■ When you click a map or shader button, the Material/Map Browser displays
additional
mental ray shaders on page 5801 .
6052 | Chapter 18 Rendering