Chapter 9

Lighting with mental ray

To achieve professional-quality, realistic renders in the Autodesk® Maya® program, you need to master the mental ray® render plug-in that comes with Maya. mental ray is a complex rendering system that is incorporated through the Maya interface. Learning how to use it properly and efficiently takes time, study, and practice. Chapters 9 through 12 discuss various aspects of working with mental ray.

This chapter is concerned with using mental ray lighting tools and techniques to create realistic renders.

A lot of options are available within mental ray that allow you to achieve a wide variety of effects. You won’t need to use all of them in every case, but a good understanding of what is available will help you ...

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