Mental Ray for 3ds Max 2018 1.

0 Release Notes

Important updates, addendums and information about Mental Ray for 3ds Max 2018

User Interface:

[#1861884] In specific cases, GI Precision and FG Precision sliders may fail.

On systems with multiple user accounts, required preset files may be missing for accounts other than
user who installed the product. If the following files are missing, GI Precision Presets and FG Precision
Presets sliders in Render Setup > Global Illumination tab will not function:

%localappdata%\Autodesk\3dsMax\2018 - 64bit\ENU\en-US\plugcfg\mentalray_gi_presets.ini
%localappdata%\Autodesk\3dsMax\2018 - 64bit\ENU\en-US\plugcfg\mentalray_fg_presets.ini

Workaround: Run the installer again from the current user account. (Alternately, you may copy these
two files from an earlier version or another user profile.)

[#1894526] Sample/preview rendering in Material Editor is suspended during ActiveShade rendering.

Only a single renderer instance may run at one time, and ActiveShade takes precedence over material
preview frames. Upon exiting ActiveShade, preview rendering will resume, but it may be necessary to
force update on some material samples.

[#1915788] When enabling Satellite/Distributed Render, you may receive an "Access is Denied" error
when adding satellite nodes to max.rayhosts. This does not impact your current render session, but
does prevent the entry from being reloaded in future sessions.

Workaround: In Windows File Explorer, browse to:

C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2018\Plugins\NVIDIA\Shaders.
Right-click the file max.rayhosts, clear any read-only flags, and enable Write and Modify permissions
for All Users. (This may require elevation to Administrator privileges.)

[#1920581] 3ds Max may become unstable when Set Key Mode is left enabled.
Workaround: Disable Set Key Mode before rendering.
Licensing:

[#1921068] When command line rendering or Backburner rendering with other renderers, 3ds Max
may fail to recover from errors if Mental Ray plugin licensing fails.
Workaround: Install valid Mental Ray license or uninstall Mental Ray.
[#1921138] When remote rendering with other renderers, 3dsmaxcmd.exe or Backburner may load
the Mental Ray plugin and consume a license.
Workaround: uninstall the Mental Ray plugin from the render node.

MDL and vMaterials:

vMaterials 1.3 will create many warnings. Please update to the latest version (1.4).

MDL materials are presently ignoring annotations. Materials are listed by class name, showing mdl
package::module::sub_module::material (in namespace notation)

Having a large number of MDL materials in the default search paths will slow initialization of the
Mental Ray plugin (mentalray.dlz) during 3ds Max startup. On a typical system, you may notice that
startup takes about 20 seconds longer when vMaterials are installed.

The 3ds Max Map/Material Browser and Slate Material Editor by default will render icons for each
material. Due to the large number of vMaterials and MDL Exchange modules, initial processing may
take several minutes. This can be mitigated by setting group display to text only.

When loading .max scenes on other systems, 3ds Max may fail to find textures in vMaterials, despite
them being installed to the default location. To work around this issue, add
Documents\mdl\nvidia\vMaterials\AEC\textures and
Documents\mdl\nvidia\vMaterials\Design\textures
to your 3ds Max texture search paths before loading the scene.

Standalone

When rendering with ray.exe, you may encounter an error loading SubstanceShader.dll. For scenes
using Substance, this will require additional dependencies to be manually copied to the installation
folders.

Mental Ray SDK

For those programming plugins and custom shaders, Mental Ray development tools may be found in the
following locations:
C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2018\Plugins\NVIDIA\SdkSamples\mentalraySDK_3dsMax2018.zip
C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2018\Plugins\NVIDIA\Shaders\dev (or)
C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\Mental Ray 3.14 Standalone for 3ds Max 2018\shaders\dev