mental ray Render Settings presets

After selecting mental ray as your renderer in the Render Settings window, you can select among the available presets via the Presets > Load Preset menu.

Use these settings as a starting point for rendering your image at a given quality and with a certain effect.

Default Settings

The default Image Size is HD 540 (960x540), which is a 16:9 ratio. Frame padding is set to 4 for correct sorting of frame files (Render Settings: Common tab). For lights, Use Ray Trace Shadows is enabled by default and the Ray Depth Limit is set to 3. Under the Render Settings: Quality tab, the Raytracing Max Trace Depth is set to 6 and the Framebuffer Data Type is set to RGBA (Half) 4x16 Bit. These settings provide a better quality initial render.

FinalFrameEXR

Select this option for high quality renders. When this option is selected, the Image format is set to OpenEXR (exr) and the Image compression method is set to ZIPS by default. The Quality slider and Max Samples are set higher than that of the other two presets. The Shadow Method is set to Segments and the Framebuffer Data Type is set to RGBA (Half) 4x16 Bit.

Production

This is the equivalent of the Production preset from Maya 2013 and below, but with Unified Sampling as the Sampling Mode. Use this when testing the final rendering.

Preview

Select this preset for the fastest render but with the lowest quality result. This option gives you an indication of what the scene will look like while taking the least amount of processing time.