Texturing mentor

Mental ray from Mental images, Germany is one of the most sought after and premier renders out there. Mental ray is a general purpose raytracer, which in plain words means that is in an excellent choice for complex renders involving a lot of reflections, refractions and complex lighting setups. Mental ray also supports global illumination and radiosity and has been widely used for film visual effects worldwide. Mental ray comes integrated in Maya and is highly programmable and this makes it a hot option with technical directors who often like to get their hands dirty on custom shader writing using programming language like C++ for specific applications.

This is a default built in render in Maya and is a general purpose render with the speed of scan line technology. Although the results of this render are pretty good, the down side is that it does not natively compute global illumination and radiosity. These are lighting techniques which results in natural and photorealistic renders. In order to render using these techniques, an assisting GI computation program is required. Therefore Maya has Mental Ray integrated for all GI and advanced raytracing related work.

The render is responsible for converting your geometry and scene elements into final image. As with everything else, there are a lot of renders available for different applications. Here is a quick run through some of the renders available within Maya and available as third party software for Maya. As it is a well known fact that Maya is the ultimate software and using which we can produce stunning eye catching effects and animation. When it comes to rendering, Maya has its own advantage over all other rendering software. Let’s discuss about the various rendering methods in the forth coming posts.

After modeling those great looking characters and scenes, its time to get working on their look and feel. The process of analyzing, designing and applying the visual feel and look is called Shading or texturing. Ever since the dawn of computer graphics, shading has undergone immense development and right from the days of wire frame 2D views to today’s photorealistic Agent smith and Neo from “The Matrix trilogy”, shading has come an art from in itself where the only limitation is the artists own vision and visualization.