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Rendering with the mental ray Renderer 79
times. This is especially important when you have
enabled placeholder objects (see the Processing
panel > Translator Options rollout (page 3–119)).
If you use distributed rendering to render a scene,
it might be hard to understand the logic behind
the rendering order. In this case, the order has
been optimized to avoid sending lots of data over
the network. Each CPU is a ssigned a bucket as t he
bucket becomes available, so different buckets can
appear in the rendered image at different times.
See the Renderer panel > Sampling Quality rollout
(page 3–98).
Note: The mental r ay renderer can also be r un
in a standalone fashion, using a command-line
interface based on the mi2 or mi3 scene description
format. This is described in the manual mental ray
Programming, which is written for programmers
writing custom shaders (page 3–1009).
See also
Getting Good Results with mental ray Rendering
(page 3–80)
3dsMaxMaterialsinmentalrayRenderings(page
3–83)
mental ray Concepts (page 3–88)
Enhancements to Standard Features (page 3–84)
Procedure
To use the mental ray renderer:
1.
Choose Rendering menu > Render . The Render
Scene dialog displays.
2. On the Common p anel, open the Assign
Renderer rollout, then click the “...” button for
the Production renderer.
A Choose Renderer dialog is displayed.
3. On the Choose Renderer dialog, click to select
mental ray Renderer, and then click OK.
Tip: After you make the mental ray renderer the
active production renderer, you can click Save
As Defaults to make the mental ray renderer the
default renderer for all new scenes. This can be
a convenient way to avoid extra setup time.
Now when you render, the Render Scene dialog
appears with the mental ray controls. You can
choose to render the scene w ith the built-in mental
ray renderer, or simply to tr anslate the scene and
save it in a .mi f ile (page 3–972) that you c an render
later , perhaps on a different system. Controls for
choosing whether to render, save to a .mi file, or
both, are on the Translator Options rollout (page
3–119).
R enderi ng wi th the mental r ay
R enderer
Rendering menu > Render > Render Scene dialog >
Common panel > Assign Renderer rollout > Choose
mental ray Renderer as the production renderer.
Main toolbar > Render Scene > Render Scene dialog
> Common panel > Assig n Renderer rollout > C hoose
mental ray Renderer as the production renderer.
To use t he mental ray translator and renderer, you
must first choose mental ray as the production
renderer, as described the "Procedures" sec tion
below. Once you have chosen mental ray
rendering, the Render Scene dialog displays panels
and rollouts that control the mental ray renderer .
Common Parameters Rollout
When you render with mental ray, cont rols on
the Render Scene d ialog > Common panel >
Common Parameters rollout remain the same, and
function just as t hey do with the default 3ds Max
scanline renderer.
Limitati ons
The mental ray renderer does not support certain
rendering features, as described here.