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.