The dark art of mental ray

By: David James | Software: Maya 2013 / Nuke | Runtime: 3 hours and 15 minutes
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About This Course

The dark art of mental ray

If you find yourself rendering over and over again for hours at a time, this is the tutorial for you. In this project we'll attempt to demystify mental rays render pass system. We pay special attention to the mia_material_x and it's outputs. We also look at common uses for render layers such as ambient occlusion and depth. Here we show you how to split your image apart to achieve an almost material level control in post. We delve into complex masking with pass contribution maps as well as simple masks using custom color passes. By the end of this course you should have total control of what comes out of mental ray, saving you lots of time. For the post production work we use Nuke.

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Lesson breakdown

Below you can find a breakdown for each individual lesson in this course

  • Lesson Pack 01 0. Intro Video
  • Lesson Pack 01 1. Linear workflow
  • Lesson Pack 01 2. Render layers
  • Lesson Pack 01 3. Render Passes
  • Lesson Pack 02 4. Nuke Composite Passes
  • Lesson Pack 02 5. Lighting Layers & Depth map
  • Lesson Pack 03 6. Nuke Composite Lighting Layers
  • Lesson Pack 03 7. Nuke DOF and Lighting Layers CONT
  • Lesson Pack 04 8. Pass contribution maps
  • Lesson Pack 04 9. Nuke Composite pass contribution maps
  • Lesson Pack 05 10. Custom passes & correct ao
  • Lesson Pack 05 11. Simplified masking

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