Realistic Architectural Visualization with 3ds Max and mental ray by Roger Cusson

Product Description

Bring new realism to your visualizations with a command of the 3ds Max toolset. Three step-by-step tutorials demonstrate exterior and interior, day and night lighting scenes. You learn the nuts and bolts of importing models from CAD programs, lighting, applying mr shaders and materials, and optimizing your renders. Mental ray is made simple with an accessible description of its tools.

* Color reproductions illustrate a wide array of subtle techniques.
* mental ray is made easy with accesible demonstations.
* Companion CD contains all of the project files.
Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #110899 in Books
Published on: 2007-04-15
Released on: 2007-04-15
Number of items: 1
Binding: Paperback
344 pages
Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover
Bring new realism to your visualizations with a command of the mental ray toolset in 3ds Max. mental ray is made simple with an accessible description of its tools and workflows. You can learn the nuts and bolts of applying materials, lighting, and optimizing your renders.

Step-by-step tutorials lavishly illustrate the processes and techniques required to produce renderings of existing models. Interior and exterior projects demonstrate how to:
*Prepare materials for interior and exterior scenes in light-free enviornments for efficient rendering
* Light a daytime interior scene including indirect illumination, color bleeding, and mr lights
* Light a nighttime interior scene including light decay, lume shaders, exposure controls, and rendering light tests
* Light an exterior scene in daylight with mr Sun and mr Sky objects
* Create a hazy exterior setting with mr Physical Sky and an applied bitmap
* Efficiently work a complex scene to reserve time consuming complete renders for the end

Valuable appendices provide direction on trasnferring CAD files from AutoCAD and Revit to 3ds Max, creating caustics and flash effects, HDRI, Render passes and Bucket rendering, common errors and the process of creating the high resolution image as seen on the front cover.

About the Author
caught the AutoCAD bug in 1985. After learning and applying the software to his profession, he became a consultant to Architectural firms implementing AutoCAD into their work process. Roger has been an active educator for years in the professional and academic communities. He has worked as a full time professor at Vanier College, and a training manager at Autodesk. He was lead author for 2 Autodesk VIZ books, and was a significant contributor to the 3ds max 8 Essentials book.
Customer Reviews

excellent book
At first I was reluctant to buy this book as the previous books about mental ray were not so helpful;being a 3ds max user. I have to confess that I was utterly surprised to find out that this book explores most areas of mental ray usage. Moreover, i was delighted to have seen for the first time a book that touches on the subject about common mental ray errors, and how to overcome them.The "flash light effect" tutorial was another big surprise for me; especially as this technique has always been linked to Maxwell renderer.
Having known jamie cardoso's work for years, I knew this book would be a good purchase.
All tutorials were innovative and very easy to follow.
Finally,the array of detailed 3D scenes,bitmaps and documentation make this book a very good value for money indeed. Many thanks to Jamie and Roger. ...Are you considering the second edition any time soon? This book left me wanting to know more.

I expected more...
If you've never done any design viz before (and I mean NEVER) you might benefit from this book. My biggest beef is that 90% of this book's content is laid out almost word for word in the Mental Ray tuts and user reference that ship with Max 9. At this price...hold off.

Not even close to realistic Architectural Visualization
I must admit that i am really dissapointed with this book. To me it seems like the author just took the reference help menu and made it his own. These renders are not even close to realism. I thought by buying this book, i would gain some confidance in the archviz field. Unfortunately that is not the case. I will have to look elsewhere to gain that confidance and to get a better book or dvd tutorial on archviz. I am not new to 3D. I have worked in 3D for 7 years using 3ds max, and Maya. This book is more accurate to be marketed towards beginners and not towards mid level or professionals.