2008

Shadows with the mental ray Renderer
The mental ray renderer can generate shadows by ray tracing. Ray tracing
traces the path of rays sampled from the light source. Shadows appear where
rays have been blocked by objects. Ray-traced shadows have sharp edges.
Ray-traced shadows
Turning off caustics makes the outlines of shadows in this scene easier to see.
You can tell the mental ray renderer to use
shadow maps on page 7928 instead
of ray-traced shadows. This can improve performance at a cost of accuracy.
Shadow controls are on the Render Scene Dialog > Renderer panel > Shadows
& Displacement rollout
on page 6114 .
Shadow Generators and the mental ray Renderer
Light objects in 3ds Max let you choose a shadow generator: Ray Traced,
Advanced Ray Traced, Shadow Map, and so on. Because the mental ray renderer
supports only two kinds of shadow generation, ray tracing and shadow maps,
some of the 3ds Max shadow generators aren't fully supported.
6058 | Chapter 18 Rendering