Rendering with mental ray & 3ds Max by Joep van der Steen

Product Description

Realize your vision with stunning renders of your 3ds Max projects that can only be achieved with a powerful engine like mental ray. Beginning with a concise review of the essential concepts, you proceed to step-by-step tutorials that teach you how to render scenes with indirect light or with specific effects, such as depth of field and motion blur. Contour line shading and various other mental ray features are presented in detail, then you learn how to use the different light types of 3ds Max inside mental ray and how to use mental rays own specific area lights and its new daylight system. Finally, the book reviews mental rayspecific materials and what effects can be obtained by using most of the specific mental ray shaders.

Key Features:
* Color reproductions illustrate a wide array of subtle techniques.
* Contains never-before-published information about how shaders work
* Companion CD-ROM includes tutorial project files
Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #45725 in Books
Published on: 2007-03-20
Number of items: 1
Binding: Paperback
256 pages
Editorial Reviews

Review
Put yourself on a path to productivity with Joeps deliberate approach to a logical workflow. Enjoy the exercises and the satisfaction you get from producing cost effective renderings and a foundation of knowledge that you can apply to your work.
Ted Boardman,
Author and Instructor

A solid foundation with thorough explanations, practical examples, and lots of pictures. Each chapter provides a clear set of objectives and insightful production tips.
Steven D. Papke,President, Vizdepot.com

From the Back Cover
Realize your vision with stunning renders of your 3ds Max projects that can only be achieved with a powerful engine like mental ray. Beginning with a concise review of the essential concepts, you proceed to step-by-step tutorials that teach you how to render scenes with

Indirect illumination options including Final Gather, Caustics, and Global Illumination
Render options such as Contour Line rendering, Camera Effects, Displacement, Depth of Field, and Motion Blur effects
Lighting options including those provided within 3ds Max, as well as the four mr lightsArea Omni and Area Spot inside the Standard Light group, and mr Sky and mr Sun inside the Photometric Light group
Material options available inside 3ds Max including Arch and Design and Car Paint, DGS and Glass materials, and Sub Surface Scattering materials
Shader options including mr material-related shaders, the tiny shaders that control small specific effects, and shaders that are used to create water, with all its effects

The companion CD includes tutorial files and sample files that demonstrate the possibilities.

About the Author
is formally trained as a civil engineer. He has worked in computer animation and visualization for the past15 years, devoting recent years to sales and training for 3ds Max and Viz within the Benelux countries. As an extension of his training activities Joep hosts an internet support portal (www.3dstudio.nl) with related tutorials and models, and annually teaches a high school level course on the fundamentals of 3ds Max. Joep mastered mental ray rendering by repeatedly throwing himself into its cold deep waters without water wings.
Customer Reviews

how to climb a mountain
Whenever you need to learn a new program, it tends to present itself as a huge mountain to climb. Mental Ray is no different. The lack of documentation comming with this Autodesk program makes climbing this mountain a sheer impossible task. Not with this book. Joep van der Steen takes you by the hand and showes you the paths. He does this by starting of with standard scene's and presets. Then with every tutorial he goes more and more into the details. Step by step you feel more and more at home with the program. Allready half way the book you have a good idea how to work with Mental Ray. But it goes on with more and more easy explanation of complicated stuff. The mountain turns out to be a joy to climb

Very Good to get you moving in the right direction
This book was extremely helpful to me as it relates to MR renders and what the various parameter do in the render dialog box. That part is worth more than 5 stars. The place it might be lacking by a small amount is the clarity in how the shaders and materials are explained. Very detailed in some places, but I found myself going back and forth from the book to the material editor to try to follow along and understand what was being explained. In the end, I learned a good deal but there were times too when I was confused by what seemed like contradictory facts, or at least I found them to be so. Like how the arch materials diffuse,reflection and transparency channels could not exceed a value of 1 when added together, yet I saw many materials constructed where those three channels added up to 3. The materials still worked as described, but I am the type that needs to understand the nitty-gritty before I feel comfortable with something. Oh well.

But all-in-all this book is WELL worth it. It will take a lot of the guess work and trail-and-error out of your MR renders. All I can say is, Good job, Mr. Van der Steen.

Yes, very good job.

The Book I Should Have Bought First Up
I've purchased several books on using mental ray and 3ds and this is the one I should have bought at the start. The author guides you through the process of using mental ray with 3ds Max, explaining and illustrating in the book what you'll see on your own computer. While setting up a rendering using mental ray is not difficult, its settings can appear daunting to both the beginner and the more experienced user. Joep goes through all of mental rays major settings in order to set up a rendering. Further, he explains how to use Final Gather alone or together with Global Illumination to achieve optimal results. This is something that not many authors do in the same depth, if at all. He also explains what each important mental ray setting means and how small changes to them affect your scenes.
A variety of interesting and different models are used throught the book and come on the accompanying CD, which is a very nice touch and so much better than the normal practise of doing everything with one or two boring models - this book is aimed at stimulating your senses through its presentation.
The author goes much further than simply setting up mental ray by covering the shaders that are included with 3ds Max and there is something in this book for just about any 3ds Max user, no matter what their level of experience. Using it as a reference will enable you to produce the renderings you've always dreamed about; and it will do so by increasing your understanding of mental ray. In the end it's the authors knowledge and explanations of how mental ray does things that makes this such a worthwhile and valuable reference.