i'd experiment with the settings one by one to see where it takes you. i have definately not mastered it, but i have gotten the results i want with work. it really is pretty powerful. one thing to make sure of though is to check and see where settings override one another (scanline vs mental ray). keep your help section open.

all the things you mentioned will help, but if you can find someone to sit down with i am sure it would bring you further in a much shorter amount of time.

thanks momentum

it seems pretty complicated. granted sophistication is what makes it so poweful but it seems like it may be too time consuming (the process of setting it up) to use at work. is it mostly trial and error like lighting with the default lights or is it more of a precise realistic system?

could you post examples of what you have done with it?

I appreciate you help

the forums on http://www.cgarchitect.com and http://www.3dtalk.com have a whole bunch of tutorials. you could also check out http://www.evermotion.org

the tutorials included with max are terrible!

You have to make the decision yourself as to what program to use and which part of the program to use. The learning curve for mentalray is huge and the renderings take foreveer. Radiosity and scanline renders are fine but the solutions take a while to run unless you know exactly what to do.

Perosnally, I use vray free with Viz 2005. Vray free is a free plugin for max and viz. The renderings are wonderful and there are no calculations to run and because there is no radiosity calculation, the file sizes remain relatively small.

Compared to MR, vray is easier to get results and you don't need to have a liquid cooled machine to run it. And besides, I don't have 24 hours to wait for a rendering.

Just my two cents.

Thanks

Yeah, i've played with V-ray a little, then my F-ing trial expired. It seems pretty sweet, where can i download a free full version? I'd like to give it another go.

I have a pretty dope machine at work. dual 3.20 processors with 4GB ram. But mental ray is still kind of slow. makes it hard to do test renderings.

i'm mainly trying to get realistic interior lighting schemes. this is a bitch with standard max lights

thanks again for your opinions

Hey wangsta. Go to vrayrender.com and click on download. Click the link for Vray Free (the link on the bottom). It is a striped down version of vray, but there is still a vraymap material that you use in you reflection and refraction slots.

Also, check out the following sites for good tutorials.
http://www.chaoticdimension.com/
http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/VRayHelp150beta/
http://www.vrayrender.com/stuff/PMapTutorial/
http://www.alzhem.com/
http://vray.info/default.asp

Hope this helps!

thanks! just what i was looking for