Mastering mental ray

This is a book about rendering, and rendering takes two basic commodities:  Time, and computing Horsepower.  Although every effort was made to keep settings to a minimum, if your goal is to learn and use mental ray then it will take you time to learn, time to render, and sufficient memory and computing power to make the journey enjoyable.

The first chapter is about the Essentials, and in there I look at some typical settings for mental ray, both for production and draft settings.  If your computer can handle larger settings, and you have the time to let the machine run, then by all means tweak things up a bit.  If you have limited resources, every effort was made to give you the knowledge you need to turn down settings where appropriate.

There are few things as frustrating as waiting for a render to finish as a deadline looms, so much of the focus of the book is examining the factors that go into how quick a render takes, and what affects the quality of your images.  The old joke is that a client can have things Fast, Cheap, and Good, but can only pick two of the three. The same goes with rendering.  If you need it fast, then quality will suffer or you need to spend some cash on additional hardware.  If you want it cheap, then it will take some time but you may have quality you need.  Untill all the computers in the world are one big parallel processor, fast and good will come at a price.  The good news is that faster always gets cheaper day by day.