What you'll learn

Start seeing better results. Learn practical workflows to simulating physically accurate lighting and rendering various surface types and gain a comprehensive overview of the high performance tools and new features of mental ray in Maya 2009. Contains nearly 4 hours of project-based training and step-by-step recipes for new artists. Popular highlights include: Overview of mental ray; Global Illumination; Emitting GI Photons from Light Sources; Photon Energy and Decay Parameters; Final Gather; Controlling Final Gather Accuracy; Adding Secondary Final Gather Bounces; Mixing Final Gather and Global Illumination; Saving and Reusing Lighting Data; Importons; Irradiance Particles; Portal Lights; Image-based Lighting; HDR Exposure Controls; Caustics; Emitting Caustic Photons from Lights; Subsurface Scattering Shader; Ambient Occlusion Shader; mental ray Architectural Materials; Render Passes for Multi-pass Rendering; Creating Pass Contribution Maps. Software required: Maya 2009 and up.