3ds Max Materials in mental ray Renderings

For the most part, the mental ray renderer treats 3ds Max maps and materials the same way the default scanline renderer does. The exceptions are listed below. In general, if the mental ray renderer does not recognize a map or material, it renders it as opaque black.

Warning: The mental ray renderer does not necessarily support maps or materials provided as plug-ins from third-party vendors. It supports third-party maps and materials only if the vendor has explicitly used the mental ray SDK to add support for the mental ray format. Unless the third-party vendor clearly specifies mental ray support, you should assume the map or material is unsupported, and will render as black.

Issues for Reflections and Refractions

The maps used to create reflections or refractions, Flat Mirror, Raytrace, Reflect/Refract, and Thin Wall Refraction, are supported by the mental ray renderer. However, the mental ray renderer simply uses these maps as indications to use its own ray-tracing method, leading to some restrictions on which parameters are supported, as described in the sections “Materials” and “Maps,” below.

Map Blurring

When reflections and refractions are ray traced, applying Blur (or Distortion, in Flat Mirror) does not apply to reflections or refractions of environment maps. In general, Blur and Distortion render differently than they do with the default scanline renderer, and you might have to experiment with parameter values to get a comparable rendering result.

Tip: If Blur effects are not rendering well with the mental ray renderer, try increasing the Maximum number of samples in the Renderer panel Sampling Quality Rollout.

Materials

The mental ray renderer does not support these materials:

• Advanced Lighting Override material
• Morpher material

Raytrace Material

The mental ray renderer supports all Raytrace material settings except for the antialiasing parameters and the settings found under Rendering Raytracer Settings and Rendering Raytrace Global Include/Exclude. All these options are specific to the default scanline renderer.

Tip: While the mental ray renderer ignores the global inclusion or exclusion settings for the ray tracer, you can enable or disable ray-tracing at the local level of a Raytrace material or map.

Maps

• Bitmap

  The mental ray renderer can't use the Progressive JPEG (.jpg) format as a bitmap. Also, Summed Area filtering is not supported (in the Filtering group of the Bitmap Parameters rollout).

  PSD files are supported, but are translated into binary data, and because of this, consume a lot of memory and increase render time. To reduce the time involved, convert the PSD file to a format such as BMP.

  The same is true of TIFF files. In addition, there are certain TIFF subformats that the mental ray renderer does not support; specifically, LZW, CCIT (fax), or JPEG compression; non-RGB color models such as CMYK, CIE, or YCbCr; or multiple images in the same file (in this case, only the first image is used). The mental ray renderer does support bilevel (1-bit), grayscale (4- or 8-bit), color map (4- or 8-bits), RGB(A) (8-, 16-, or 32-bit) TIF images, and TIF files with image strips.

• Combustion map

  The mental ray renderer doesn't support this map.

• Flat Mirror map

  Flat Mirror is supported by the mental ray renderer, except for the First Frame Only and Every Nth Frame parameters.

• Raytrace map

  The mental ray renderer supports all Raytrace map settings except for the antialiasing parameters.

• Reflect/Refract map

  This map tells the mental ray renderer to use ray-traced reflections and refractions. Most parameters are supported, but the parameters Blur Offset, First Frame Only, Every Nth Frame, and Atmosphere Ranges are not supported.

  Note: The mental ray renderer does not fully support cubic maps for Reflect/Refract maps. It uses cubic maps if they have already been generated by the default scanline renderer, but it does not generate them. If Source From File is active and the mental ray renderer can find the six cubic maps, it uses them. If Source Automatic is active, or if the cubic maps cannot be found, the mental ray renderer generates ray-traced reflections or refractions instead.