2008

5 Apply the material to objects you wish to use as shaded volumes.
mental ray Displacement
Displacement shading with the mental ray renderer is similar to
displacement
mapping
on page 5391 of standard materials. One advantage of using mental
ray displacement is that the additional polygons of displaced surfaces are
stored only in the mental ray scene database, not in your 3ds Max scene, so
they do not increase the memory requirements of your scene, except at render
time. This can be a big improvement in performance over displacement
mapping with standard materials and the scanline renderer.
Procedures
To add displacement to a mental ray rendering:
1 Choose Customize > Preferences. Go to the mental ray panel, and turn
on Enable Mental Ray Extensions.
2
On the Render toolbar, click Render Scene.
If the active renderer is not already the mental ray renderer, go to the
Common panel, and on the Assign Renderer rollout, click the “...” button
for the Production renderer. A Choose Renderer dialog is displayed.
Highlight “mental ray Renderer” in the list, and then click OK.
Leave the Render Scene dialog open, or minimize it.
3
Open the Material Editor.
4
On the mental ray Connection rollout, click to unlock the
Displacement component. Click the button and use the Browser to assign
a displacement shader to the surface.
WARNING This overrides any displacement assigned to the base material as
a standard map.
Another technique would be to use the mental ray material on page 5449
, and assign a shader to the Displacement component. (If you are using
mental ray Renderer | 6079