Maya Tutorials: Streamline Render and Final Gather v1

  Next on the tutorial list is techniques using Mental Ray. Which along with talking about final gather (which involves bouncing light off surfaces), also demonstrates using a Mental Ray shader to produce glow within renders. This glow effect, by the looks of things, is a lot more solid than the glow effects from using a normal surface-shader, which calculates a glow as a post-effect. The mai ndifference with the mental ray shader is it acts as a light source, with enough intensity it projects itself onto other surfaces as seen below.

  The other primarytechnique was using legacy systems to shave time off renders. However it seems that over the Easter break (I started this tutorial jsut before), the file generated what might possibly be a bug that produces rather grainy ray-tracing shadows, so while the shadows are less intense, the depth map render provides cleaner shadows while the ray-trace feels somewhat gritty. Other attempts at using ray-tracing, on other files, turns out much smoother however.

Depth map render

Ray-trace render