Rendering Tutorials?

TWilson

Heyall. I'd like to improve my rendering skills. Like using the mentalray SSS shader for example. However I'm finding it difficult to find good tutorials that aren't high level and instead have direct examples of usage.

How are you all getting into this stuff? I'm sure there are some awesome tutorials somewhere...

I suppose I should also mention that I've come across some that were written for earlier maya versions like 6.0. The first result in google is for some hideous alien guy I can barely look at nevermind feel comfortable using as an example. (http://www.lamrug.org/resources/doc/sss-skin-tutorial.pdf)

dnorth

http://gnomonology.com/tutorial/13
http://gnomonology.com/group/15

arrangemonk

the only thing i can recomend
is getting vray
http://www.vray.us/free_vray_demo.shtml
(sorry, only found vray for max)

edit:
you could also try betatesting for maya ahaha^^
http://www.chaosgroup.com/pr/20051122_01.html

TWilson

Wow how great is that site dnorth? Thanks!!

I grabbed vray but it almost seems like a cop out for not learning mental ray in maya.

TWilson

hurrah.

JordanW

nice! some quick tips I can give on using the SSS shader

you can use a texture to control some of the things like scale conversion factor, while this isn't "physically" accurate it'll help you get more scattering or a softer look in areas you want. putting a bitmap inside of an output node is similar to multiplying it by a scalar in UE3 except you have some curve control. (i know this is at the bottom of every bitmap node but if you use these you can instance your textures without worrying about the output settings)

The scale of your model really does affect how this shader looks, if you're not getting what you want, mess with that scale conversion value.

You may not need to create a texture for every slot, sometimes can duplicate your diffuse to your subdermal layer and use the output node to intensify the reds or make it darker etc...

If you have any specific questions about using mental ray or it's shaders I think this would be a good spot to post them.

Soon I hope to get into how to use the more basic shaders that are MR Specific like the dielectric junk or whatever it's called, hopefully it will result in more control and craziness!

IronHawk

quick reply here but this guy has some cool materials/tuts/downloads on his site and is a MR jedi.

http://www.jeffpatton.net/index.html

JordanW

holyshit that's a great source of info.

JordanW

So I dug through jeff pattons huge mental ray blog this weekend and there seems to be a ton of information in there. I have a question though for anyone that might be mental ray savvy... what's the advantage of building mental ray shaders? I know the SSS shaders are nice and the architectural ones have some nice features, but what's the advantage of using the 'mental ray' shader node or any of the DGS or dielectric materials?? I also noticed that you can unhide lambertian, phong etc shaders if you edit .mi files in your max dir, is there an advantage to using these over max's standard ones?

kary

DGS material is for physically accurate materials (using photometric lights), very good for light studies (architectural visualization, etc). Dielectric is the same for transparent stuff.

More or less no. The max to MR translations done are very good now and some of the legacy stuff is slower.

http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com/ is another great resource. He's also posted a lot of good stuff at CGTalk, particularly in the lighting challenge forum, but it's sort of hard to dig out the informative stuff out of a forum after awhile.