3Ds Visualization Studio

Rendering is a process normally designer will go through several of times in order to get high quality image. While you working with mental ray in3ds Max, it will provide you few tools which you can initiate a good render process of your scene:

• 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.