Rendering With Mental Ray 3rd Edition

Description

Written by the mental ray software project leader, this book gives a general introduction into rendering with mental ray, as well as step-by-step recipes for creating advanced effects and tips and tricks for professional users. A comprehensive definiton of mental ray's scene description language and the standard shader libraries are included as the basis for all examples. The third, completely revised edition covers the latest version of the new generation of mental ray, version 3.4. A CD with a fully programmable demo version of the software, together with example scene data and shaders that are described in the book, is enclosed.

Introduction.- Overview.- Scene Construction.- Cameras.- Surface Shading.- Light and Shadow.- Volume Rendering.- Caustics and Global Illumination.- Motion Blur.- Hardware Rendering.- Contours.- Shaders and Phenomena.- Postprocessing and Image Output.- Geometric Objects**.- Instancing and Grouping.- Inheritance.- Incremental Changes and Animations.- Using and Creating Shader Libraries**.- Parallelism.- The Options Block.- The Architecture of mental ray 3.x**.- Quality and Performance Tuning.- Troubleshooting*.- ColorPlates.- Command Line Options.- The Sphere and Utah Teapot Models.- Base Shaders*.- Physics Shaders*.- Contour Shaders*.- Glossary.- Bibliography.- Index