• The Rendered Frame window
• The Render Setting dialog
• The Main toolbar
• By pressing the F9 function button (renders the last rendered view)

Rendered Frame Window

The Rendered Frame window is nothing unique to mental ray, although the entire lower section of the window appears only when the mental ray renderer is active. This area is typically referred to as the “mental ray settings area.” Here are some of the settings that are of most importance:

Image Precision slider at the bottom of rendered image allows you to controls the antialiasing of the image. When the value of the slider is reduced, you will realize that jagged edges occur along diagonal lines in the image. However when you set the value higher, it produces better images and at the same time increase the render times. This slider actually used to adjusts the Samples per Pixel values that found in the Render Setup under Sampling Quality rollout.

Next of the Image Precision, you will see Soft Shadows Precision. It controls the quality of Soft Shadows that apply at whole scene whether soft shadows are on or not. Soft shadows are produced when light is being discharged from an object in the scene. The feathered effect of the shadows produced from these lights that provide a great improvement when you are rendering your object and animation. When you are performing test renders for your scene, you may consider turn off this slider completely because this feature consumes quite a lot of time. Soft Shadows Precision can also be controlled in the Render Setup dialog, whereby it controlled from Global Tuning Parameters that can be found at Renderer tab.

Then you will see Final Gather that next to see Soft Shadows Precision. This slider enable you to controls the level of Final Gather settings from most details to become less details (Off to Very High). To turn off this features or lower the value setting, you just drag the slider to left and to adjust it more higher settings, you can just drag the slider to the right however when you adjust it to higher value it will increase render times considerably. Refining Final Gather beyond Draft also can be done through settings that can be found at Render Setup dialog, the Indirect Illumination tab, and the Final Gather rollout.

Besides that, there is other feature that might useful when come to render with mental ray, Glossy Reflections and Refractions Precision. These two sliders enable you to control the precision of reflections at the whole scene and refractions in reflective or refractive of the objects within the scene. Lower values will cause the object to artifacts and jagged edges, while higher values will make the images better but longer render times.

Then there is Max Reflections function and it able to controls the degree of reflections that can apply in a scene. For scenes that have a lot of reflective objects, you may consider on apply the value of 3, it maybe not clear but it consider enough for overall scene. For scenes that have objects with low reflectivity, you can reduce this features value to save you rendering time.

Beside there is other functions quite similar to Max Reflection is call, Max Refractions. This feature enables you to controls the refractions that assigned through transparent objects within a scene. As we all know that light will gets refracted at each surface of transparent object. When there is object that applies transparent objects in the scene, it requires you calculate the degree of refractions that based on the maximum number of surfaces allow the light to pass through. For example, a glass window with a thickness and value of 2; then a glass vase, it would be 4 in term of it value; and so on. If you value is too low, the transparent object will not be able to seen through.

Then we have FG Bounces feature that we need to know when come to mental ray rendering. It enables you to adjust the amount of times mental ray will calculate the diffuse light that bounces back in the scene. When you are switch it from 0 bounces to 1, it will have a dramatic effect and increasing the value past 3 will have a minimal effect that you had on the scene.

Other than that, there have Reuse Geometry option is useful for renders after the geometry in the scene that changes no long after that. The mental ray renderer can speed up the rendering calculation of the geometry translation process.

Lastly we have Reuse Final Gather whereas this lock is useful for test renders when geometry, lighting, and major material that have a small changes. You can save the FG at a lower resolution (300x) and reuse it for larger final renders (5000x), provided the camera angle and the image ratio remain intact. The Initial Final Gather is computed on one computer only to avoid artifacts. Later, the FG Map tile can he used with the Reuse Final Gather option, on multiple machines, if available.

ake you job easily, it provided with several tabbed panels. After you’re familiar with 3ds Modeling, Mapping and Lighting then you’re ready to render a file.

The Render dialog box contains several adjustments like Common, Renderer, Render Elements, Raytracer, and Advanced Lighting. In the Common panel, it includes commands that usefully for all renderers and the Renderer panel however includes specific adjustments for the selected renderer.

Let Start Your Render Job

You can see at the bottom of the Render Scene dialog box, there has several controls that are available for you to start your work. The render modes are Production and ActiveShade and each of these modes can apply in a different renderer and different render settings that adjusted from Assign Renderer rollout.

When any objects in the rendered scene are missing such as mapping coordinates, the dialog box will appears at your screen to ask you whether you want to Continue or Cancel. This system apply for missing external files or any missing XRefs as well whereby it will ask you whether you want to continue, cancel, or locate from the missing file.

Besides that, the Preset option that next to the Production and Active Shade lets you save and load a saved preset of renderer settings that you set before. When you click on saving or loading a preset, the Select Preset Categories dialog box will pop up on your screen and allow you to select which panels of settings to include into the preset. The panels listed changes depend on defined selected renderer and all the presets are saved in the .RPS file format.

Below the Preset option, there is Viewport drop-down list that contain all the available viewports such as perspective, front, left and right. When you open Render Scene dialog box, your active viewport will be highlighted in the Viewport drop-down list and the viewport that selected is the one that will gets rendered.

After that, the small lock icon next to the Viewport show the selected viewport will always be ren­dered when the Render button is clicked. Later that, when you click the Render button, the Rendering dialog box appears to displays all the settings for the current render job and tracks its progress.

Understand Some of The Common Parameters Functions

Specifying Range And Size

The Time Output section is extremely important to designer because it defines which animation frames that need to be render in the output. First of all, let look at the Single option renders, it show only the current frame specified at the Time Slider. Then the Active Time Segment option renders completely all the frames within the range of frames. To help your job much more easily, the Range option will provide you the help you need just by set a range of frames require to be rendered by key in the beginning and ending frame numbers.

Lastly is Frames option that can help you in your render process whereby you can key in individual frames and ranges using commas or hyphens. The Every Nth Frame value is active for the Active Time Segment and Range options and it renders every nth frame in the active segment. This option is useful when you rendering animation that require for speed-up animations.

In term of file format, you don’t need to render long animation sequences using the .AVI, .MPEG, or .MOV formats because it causes you all lot of trouble and the entire file will be corrupt. Instead, it is recommended to render the frames as individual images. These individual images can then be use to reassembled into a video format using the Video Editing Software such as Adobe’s After Effect.

Other than that, Output Size sections at render dialog box actually use to determine the resolution for the images or animation that rendered. It contain the drop-down list of standard film and video resolutions, various 35mm and 70mm options, Anamorphic, Panavision, IMAX, VistaVision, NTSC, PAL, and HDTV standards. Plus, a Custom option is available for you to determine your own resolution.

Render options

The Options section below the Output Size contains some functions like Atmospherics, Effects, Displacement, Video Color Check, Render to Fields, Render Hidden Geometry, Area Lights/Shadows as Points, Force 2-Sided and Super Black

• Atmospherics is use to renders any atmospheric effects that are set up in the Environment dialog box
• Effects are allows you to render any effects that have been set up in the scene.
• Displacement are enables you to render any surface displacement caused by displacement modifier.
• Video Color Check are allows you to check for nonsafe NTSC or PAL colors. Nonsafe means the colors played incorrectly when these formats are used.
• Render to Fields are actually enables you to render an animations as fields. It normally is used by video formats.
• Render Hidden Geometry is actually a function for you to renders all objects in the scene, including hidden objects. Using the option, you can hide objects for quick viewport updates and include them in the final rendering
• Area Lights/Shadows as Points is function for you to render area lights and shadows so it can use up a lot of time due to the quantity of your point lights. By enabling this option, you can see your object’s shadow and more realistic.
• Force 2-Sided is actually for designer to renders both sides of every face and come handle when designer want to render doubles side however it also consume a lot of your render time.
• Super Black on the other hand used for video compositing. Rendered images with black backgrounds have trouble in some video formats. The Super Black option will solve these problems.