#linear workflow

This post is a step by step on how to unlock the power of Mental Ray in Maya 2012.

This post shows how to set up a Unified Sampling workflow using Mental Ray and Maya 2012. 

This is nothing new there is a lot of stuff around the web about it. I'm just trying to condense it as much as possible as I have been using this workflow for one of my projects and it has become THE workflow to use for any project I use Mental Ray. 

Unified Sampling

For those of you who have heard about Unified Sampling you might think it's kind of a mythical creature, something that parents tell their kids that they once saw. Well it's is indeed real and it works like a charm! :D

I'm not going to go into any technical details on what it is or why it is beneficial to you. I will say that if you don't know what a mia material is or you still use spotlights to light EVERY-SINGLE-THING in the world, even if your are trying to do some physically accurate lighting... then stay away from this.

The advantages it has when using mia materials with this workflow is that you do not have to worry any more about samples. Not even with lights.... In fact when you set up unified sampling the Anti-Aliasing controls from the render settings no longer work! So that means no more people setting up Fixed Sampling of min 4 and max 6 without knowing what they're doing!!! Thank god for that...

Anyway let's get to the chase. To unlock the power of unified sampling you should use this handy code:

UnifiedSampling.mel

(I think i got this code from here, although I'm not sure because I've read a million things about unified sampling in these last months...)

This will create a few String options in the Mental Ray defaults. Once you've done that make sure to change your primary renderer to Raytracing:

Here you can see the options (panel on the right). Basically using unified sampling is like turning a quality knob. The more you increase the samples quality number the less grain you'll have but the more time it'll take. (It'll never take as much time as setting fixed sampling to ridiculous samples...). This approach to managing the quality of your renders this way is very similar to using Adaptice DMC in Vray, so those who are used to that, this should be fairly quickly to pick up.

And that is basically it! You have it set up! Go try it! It is truly awesome in my view and the results it has given me are amazing.

So how do I take Full advantage of this!?!?!

Well... in terms of shaders: USE MENTAL RAY MATERIALS!!!... Because they are easier to use, and now even easier because you don't even have to worry about glossy samples! Leave them at 1 always! Unified sampling will take care of the rest.

In terms of lights? USE AREA LIGHTS! But not normal crappy expensive area lights... Cool  "more physically accurate" Mental Ray Area lights.

Set up Decay to Quadratic

Mental Ray shadows with everything to 1 (unified sampling will take care of it!)

And Enable the Use Light Shape check box in the Mental Ray>Area Light tab.

And thaaaaat is how you do that! :D

Well I hope this helps... it definitely took some time to figure out the fool-proof approach for all of this but I hope this helps people get a little love back for mental ray if you have no other option left...

To read all about Unified Sampling check out http://elementalray.wordpress.com/ These guys are awesome and have a tone of stuff on this topic. That is why I'm not going to copy all of their info in this post! Go take a look at it!

Also I recommend creating a couple of buttons in your shelf for setting up this workflow easily. And use the command:

select miDefaultOptions;