After having talked with folks at ILM, LucasArts, Rhythm + Hues, they all told me one thing: make lighting look realistic. Lighting does not always have to be realistic, but it just depends on the purpose of the project. Mental ray is a renderer which creates realistic lighitng. Mental ray accepts scene data using its .mi scene description language in either ASCII or mixed ASCII/binary form. Mental Ray is the first rendering software which combines the physically correct simulation of the behavior of light with full programmability for the creation of any imaginable visual phenomena.
mental ray has been integrated into Softimage|3D and Softimage|XSI, Autodesk 3ds max, Alias|Wavefront Maya, Side Effects Software's Houdini 5, SolidWorks PhotoWorks 2, and Dassault Système's CATIA V4 and V5 products. A number of translators and translator plug-ins allow for using mental ray in conjuction with various 3D modeling and animation front-end systems. It is also widely used within the industry to light cg models for compositing into live footage.
My experience with mental ray has been with Maya 5.0. There are numerous mental ray shaders including, volume and lens effects, control of global illumination simulation through photon shaders and the Photon Map™ as well as displacement maps.
This is a simple test that uses a photon-collector to create caustics.
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This is the simple layout of the maya scene from the top view. The scene file is actually quite simple. I applied a photonic material to the glass sphere. |
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This was rendered in 3 minutes on an hp workstation xw8000 |
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| It takes time playing with all of the different shaders, and settings within the attribute editor, and render globals to understand what everything does. The more time spent with something, the better you understand it. | |
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