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Where to start? – mental ray 101
Where should I start?
Simple, in the begining!
Great, but… how do we define the begining?
For now, I am to remove the middle man (applications that wrap around mental ray) and will just work with just mental ray.
Why?
Because at the end of the day everything on any application (maya/3ds max) is translated into mental ray terms.
Ok, cool but what am I going to need?
- A decent computer.
- A copy of mental ray stand alone, which you can get if you get a copy of the book Writing mental ray shaders: A perceptual introduction by Andy Kopra
- mymentalray.com standalone scene, which you can download here.
- An account at mymentalray.com for posting questions at the forum and for downloading things that we learn.
- Some basic command line knowledge
- Patience, lots of patience, but you will be rewarded.
How do I install it?
I could write a bunch about the installation and tricks for each platform, but I am going to let you read through the PDFs. Be sure to request the license from mental images according to the installation.
Ok, It is installed, now what?
Lets start rendering!
Once you have downloaded our scene file,
- Open a terminal
- Windows Start Menu: run -> cmd (enter)
- Linux (depends on your distribution)
- Mac OS X (Finder: Go – /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app)
- Go to the directory where the scene file is (usually on the Downloads directory if you used Safari or Firefox)
- Windows: cd c:\Documents and Settings\$username\Downloads
- Linux and Mac OS X: cd ~/Downloads
- Go to the actual folder for the scene:
- All platforms: cd MYMR_material_standalone
- Render it:
- All platforms: ray MYMR_Material_new_mi_export.mi
Your output should look like this:
First render using the standalone mymentalray.com scene
Ok, I am going to let you guys have a little bit of rest so that this info sits down and is absorbed.
This will be eventually some tutorials on mymental ray.com and I will appreciate feedback regarding any issues.
In the next post, I am going to give an overall explanation about a scene file and its contents.
Hey JuanCarlos,
I download the mr standalone scene and tried to render it following your instructions (running the ray command from within the downloaded folder) I have a version of standalone from Andy’s book.
However when i render I just get illumination of the sphere and steps. No textures.
Here is a link to my render and to my render log.
http://www.bedistinct.co.uk/post/mmr_render.rar
It appears to be a problem that it can’t find a shader called texture_uv.mi or .dll
They are not included in the mymentalray standalone folders, nor are they installed with copy of standalone.
Be great if you could take a look.
Cheers
Richard
Comment by Richard on September 2, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Good catch, I’ll be publishing those shaders today. They are part of the mymr libraries.
Thanks
Comment by jcarlos on September 2, 2009 at 3:21 pm
great. Thanks JC
Comment by Richard on September 2, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Hey JuanCarlos,
Did you upload the texture shaders at all?
Thanks
Richard
Comment by Richard on September 6, 2009 at 5:08 am
Better yet. I removed the dependency and it is just using out of the box shaders. Please redownload it from:
http://www.mymentalray.com/index.php?option=com_shaders&Itemid=107&Action=DisplayDetail&ObjectId=43
Comment by jcarlos on September 6, 2009 at 10:51 am
thanks JuanCarlos.
Is it ok if I call you JC?
Rich
Comment by Richard on September 6, 2009 at 11:14 am
Sure thing
Comment by jcarlos on September 10, 2009 at 10:57 pm