I have a problem, i need to create a box of glass (as real as possible) and i have 3s max 6, but no idea how to use the mental ray renderer (in fact: the "generate caustics"-feature...) Does someone knows a good tutorial in mental ray(caustics)? (just mental ray...working about a year with max...) or has a little time for a short description...thx gr RZR
on the render dialog, set the production render to mentalray. you'll know it's using the mentalray renderer if it renders in blocks (buckets) and not going at it from top to bottom line by line (the way of the max scanline renderer).
kk..i'm rendering all the time with mental ray...but i need to know how to generate caustics..(the glass-transcluent-effect...)->(properties on lights, objects and renderer...)???
Umm you need to set up the caustics in the lume section as well as the material of the glass in question. CGtalk has some mental ray matlibs that work in max after you edit the .mi's that are all set up for glass etc and also a test scene with caustics,hdri and all that other good stuff.
also there are some tutorials availbale on discreet that deal with mental ray. Bit of a download but definitley worth it.
Just set the box's material to glass physics phen on the material library
Don't forget to enable caustics on the indirect illumination rollout and tweak it's settings. Enable the final gather too if you intend to use skylight lighting method.
right click and go to the glass object's properties. in the mental ray tab set the thing to generate caustic. Try and combine it with HDRI lighting or just use it as an environment reflection.
I you want to render high quality caustics, don't forget to increase the global photon to 100000.
and lastly, never use omni light for the caustic. use spotlight or others instead. Omni light will cast all the photons in every direction making your render veeeeery slow. It's better to not use it.
