9

78 Chapter 17: Rendering
(page 3–89) and Depth of Field with the mental ray
Renderer (page 3–90).
menta l r a y 3 . 5 R en der er
The mental ray
®
renderer from mental images
®
is a general-pur pose renderer that can generate
physically correct simulations of lighting effects,
including ray-traced reflections and refractions
(page 3–88), caustics (page 3–92),andglobal
illumination (page 3–93).
Note: mental images and mental ray are registered
trademarks, and photon map is a trademark of
mental images GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin, G er m any.
Scene rendered with the default 3ds Max scanline renderer
Same scene rendered with the mental ray renderer
The second rendering, done with the mental ray ren dere r,
shows caustics cast by refraction throu g h the mar ti ni g l ass.
Caustics are a lso visible in the re flection on the cocktail shaker.
The mental ray renderer in 3ds Max supports the
mental r ay version 2 (mi2) and version 3 (mi3)
formats. It does not support the mental ray version
1(mi1)format.
Dif fer ences Bet ween the menta l r ay
R enderer a nd t he Def aul t S canl ine
Renderer
Compared to the default 3ds Max scanline
renderer, t he mental ray renderer relieves you of
the need to simulate complex lighting effects "by
hand"orbygeneratingaradiositysolution.The
mental r ay renderer is optimized to use multiple
processors and to take advantage of incremental
changes for efficient rendering of animations.
Unlike the default 3ds Max renderer, which renders
scanlines from the top of the image downward, the
mental ray renderer renders rectangular blocks
called buckets. The order in which the buckets
are rendered can vary, depending on the m ethod
you choose. By defa ult, mental ray uses the
Hilbertmethod,whichpicksthenextbucketto
render based on the cost of switching to the next
one. Because objects can be discarded f rom the
memory to render other objects, it’s important to
avoid having to reload the same object multiple