Mental Ray 3.

4 For 3d Studio Max HDR

In this paper I am covering how to achieve beautiful images using the many lighting features capable within mental
ray using 3d studio max 6 and up. For my tests I am using Mental Ray 3.4 and 3D studio Max 8.0
Lighting is one of the most important factors in the process of 3D Animation. The lighting of a scene can
drastically increase the realism of your renders, but also, if poorly done, totally degrade all other work put into your scene.
Today there are many modern 3D Animation terms that are being thrown around; Global Illumination, Indirect Illumination,
Final Gathering, Caustics, Photons, raytracing, High Dynamic Range Radiance Image Lighting, Sub Surface Scattering and
so on. So what are these new methods doing to revolutionize how 3D animation looks and fools today's audience?
Lets take a look.
Ray Tracing and Global Illumination
Okay so I am not going to go into detail on what Global Illumination is but for those who aren't familiar with it
this is a good source on explaining some of the basic concept of it.
Applying this to Mental Ray in Max is Pretty easy, yet some people aren't sure how to do it.
Much ray-tracing on surfaces comes from the properties on the materials themselves, but ray tracing not only has to
do with interaction with shaders: it also applies to shadowing.
An example:

This is a more advanced form of Lighting, being that it involves a Radiance Map as the source of light and it has to
travel through the Refracting glass orb and the metallic orbs have to reflect the environment as well
here is my scene setup:

As you can see the only light in the scene is a skylight. Most people wont even really consider that a light in itself.
Other renderers include a skylight function in the properties of the render dialogue itself, to avoid fiddling with lights if all
one wants is a skylight Lit scene. In this case, since mental ray doesn't include such an option we can use the skylight in the
max light options to give that same effect.
In this render I used what is called a High Dynamic Range Radiance Image. The details on these images can all be
found at Paul Debevec's Site .
What I did in this scene was take that High Dynamic Range Radiance Image and use the information from that file,
and mental ray can use that to duplicate lighting conditions found in that location from the lights and darks taken at the
various exposure levels from the image capturing process. In mental ray you would use what is called Final Gathering to
complete this task.

This is the image probe I used

What one must do to get this image to light this scene is to create a skylight (found under the max 6+ lights) and
make sure that it is set to use background color. Next, set the level of intensity to around .3-.5 (full intensity drowns the
scene in overly strong light for some reason, thus toning it down might be needed)
The next step is to set the background as the image probe, so that your objects have a background to reflect. So go
to Rendering>Environment and under the Environment map choose your probe. Before we continue we have to take an
important step involving the material editor. Drag and drop the environment map from the Environment properties, over to
an empty (unused) slot in the material editor:

Now set the environment mapping to Spherical Environment so it wraps around the scene like it should.
The next process would be to open up the mental ray rendering options and turn on Final Gathering
Upon turning final gathering on, you will notice a speed decrease, this is due to the increased calculations needed to
accomplish the task. You should use the following to achieve similar to the render I got.

These settings gave me a 4 minute 30 second render time on a 1 Ghz Pentium III

This is a very quick render time for a render like this.

As simple as this is, I couldn't find a simple tutorial to explain how to do this one 3d studio max. So I decided to figure it
out and write one myself. Hope this helps some people out.