Difficulty creating renders in 3ds Max, how do you guys do this?

mrgesy

I'm learning realistic offline rendering using mental ray in 3ds Max and really confused. The material creation/testing process is SO slow. I like seeing my work in progress in real time (like in UE4), but in 3ds max its like totally guess work. Its difficult to create something like old glass details or detailed fruits and such, without taking ages to keep rendering the object and being unable to see anything through all the noise issues.
How do you guys do this? Its difficult to predict lighting and get details how I want them without spending so long on rendering and checking and endless tweaking.
At the end I always end up with unfinished work...

skyline5gtr

Very Carefully

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Model_Presentation

CrackRockSteady

If iterating quickly is a priority you might consider using UE4 or Marmoset 2 (something with a PBR workflow) to get a rough idea of what your materials will look like in a physically based rendering system. That will allow you to quickly make adjustments to your textures and materials and hopefully get you 80% of the way there before you need to actually do any Mental Ray renders.

Beyond that, doing selection/area renders can save time when making small adjustments, as well as lowering render quality settings and/or resolution when doing test renders.

At the end of the day though, the truth is getting nice renders in Mental Ray is not a fast process. It takes a lot of time and practice to get a handle on it.