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84 Chapter 17: Rendering
Materials
The mental ray renderer does not support these
mater ials:
• Advanced Lighting Override material
•Lightscapematerial
•Morphermaterial
Raytrace Material
The mental ray renderer supp orts a ll Ray tr ace
material settings except for the antialiasing
parameters and the settings found under
Rendering > Raytracer Settings and Rendering
> Raytrace Global Include/Exclude. All these
options are s pecific to the default s canline renderer.
Tip: While the mental ray renderer ignores the
global inclusion or exclu sion settings for the ray
tracer, you can enable or disable ray-tracing at the
local level of a Raytrace material or map.
Maps
•Bitmap
The mental ray renderer can’t use the
Progressive JPEG (.jpg) format as a bitmap.
Also, Summed Area filtering is not supported
(in the Filtering group of the Bitmap Parameters
rollout).
PSD files are supported, but are translated into
binary data, and because of this, consume a
lot of memory and increase render time. To
reducethetimeinvolved,convertthePSDfile
to a format such as BMP.
ThesameistrueofTIFFfiles.Inaddition,there
are certain TIFF subformats that the mental ray
renderer does not support; specifically, LZW,
CCIT (fax), or JPEG compression; non-RGB
colormodelssuchasCMYK,CIE,orYCbCr;or
multiple images in the same file (in this case,
only the first image is used). The mental ray
renderer does support bilevel (1-bit), g rayscale
(4- or 8-bit), color m ap (4- or 8-bits), RGB(A)
(8-, 16-, or 32-bit) TIF images, and TIF files
with image strips.
•Combustionmap
The m ental ray renderer doesn’t support this
map.
•FlatMirrormap
Flat Mirror is supported by the mental ray
renderer, except for the First Frame Only a nd
Every Nth Frame parameters.
•Raytracemap
The mental ray renderer supports all Raytrace
map settings except for the antialiasing
parameters.
• Reflect/Refract map
This map tells the mental ray renderer to use
ray-traced reflections and refractions. Most
parameters are supported, but the parameters
BlurOffset,FirstFrameOnly,EveryNthFrame,
and Atmosphere Ranges are not supported.
Note: The mental ray renderer does not fully
support cubic maps for Reflect/Refract maps.
It uses cubic maps if they have already been
generated by the default scanline renderer, but
it does not generate them. If Source > From File
is active and the mental ray renderer can find
the six cubic maps, it uses them . If Source >
Automatic is active, or if the cubic maps cannot
be found, the mental ray renderer generates
ray-traced reflections or refractions instead.
Enha ncements to S tanda rd
Fe atures
The primary interface to the mental ray renderer
consists of rollouts on the Render Scene dialog.
Yo u m u s t u s e t h e Assign Renderer rollout (page
3–35) to choose the mental ray renderer, as
described in this procedure (page 3–79).