Mental Ray Render Optimisation
This tutorial was created to document my procedure for optimising the render settings in mental ray to create a scene that renders quickly and most importantly looks good. There are 3 key lighting settings that should be looked at to produce a good result, these key setting are Global Illumination (GI), Final Gather (FG) and Ambient Occlusion (AO).
The current 3ds max scene you can see is based on the Jubilee Chapel by Richard Meier and was created for a previous project. The model in this scene is complex but the lighting and materials are set up very simply. The lighting in the scene is from a MR sun and sky with soft shadows, and the materials are Arch & Design with the matte finish template and a diffuse colour.
The non-optimised to final optimised render comparison
Move the slider in the flash file above to see the comparison between a non-optimised render (FG - High, GI - None, AO - None) which took 21 minutes to complete vs an optimised render (FG - Low, GI - Low, AO - on) which took 5 and a half minutes to render.
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