Mental ray and raytrace help
 

Could someone lease explain to me just where to find and how to use metal ray and raytrace. I'm a little confused as to their function.

Re: Mental ray and raytrace help
 

You should read the documentation, instructions on how to take full advantage of all of mental rays capabilities can't be explained in a post.

If you just want to use Mental ray instead of ScanLine just open the Rendering screen (F10)
then go to the bottom where there is a bar labled "Assign Renderer" click it and some more options will appear

There should be a lable that says Production and next to it will say "Default Scanline renderer" click the button to the right and choose mental ray.


this will turn on mental ray as your renderer, but in order to actually get good quality renders you need to take advantage of other things like GI ... which I could explain but It is all well documented so you should just read up on it.

Re: Mental ray and raytrace help
 

Changing to Mental Ray or "mr" as you will see in some places will make more materials show up. Raytrace can be found in the material editor (press "M") Presets such as car paint, or some architectual stuff already has raytrace assigned to them so it dosnt take much tweaking. Raytrace makes things reflective.

Re: Mental ray and raytrace help
 

Mental ray is a renderer. You know how when you render, you see that little white line move down the picture? That's the scanline renderer. Mental ray is a different renderer that has more features.

Raytrace is a rendering technique used to calculate reflections and refractions for things like glass and water. You can read up on this raytracing explanation (with awesome mspaint gfx!). Both the default Scanline renderer and mental ray can do raytracing.