Soccer ball rendering tutorial – Mental Ray

I just wanted to post the quick render setup I used with mental ray to render the soccer ball in another tutorial.
First you’ll have to change your renderer since 3Ds max is by default using the Scanline renderer. (I think 3Ds max Design has mental ray as their default renderer)
To change it just press F10 to open the render setup (rendering>render setup) and scroll that window down to the bottom. Click the plus sign besides “Assign Renderer”.
Click the three little dots icon next to the production renderer, just like this :

And in that new window, you should be able to select Mental Ray. Do it. When done, you can close the render setup for now.
Follow the modeling and texturing tutorial from the site to have the same object. This render setup could probably be used in other situations.
Since I dont need to place the lights one by one, I’ll just add a photo of the lights in diferent viewports. This should be enough to locate them about correctly.

Remember, you can fine tune the settings for the lights and everything, this is just an example that you can base or inspire from.

1.Camera : I actually placed the perspective view to something I was OK with, then just created a camera from that viewport. (Create>Cameras>Create camera from view)

2. mr Area Spot (create tab>lights>standards>mr Area Spot). No special settings, just placed it that way.

3.Omni light : place it correctly and then change this setting (un-check diffuse) :

4.mr Area Spot. Once again, no special settings, just place it good. Yeah, it’s pretty far away from the object. I think (I’m not a pro eh…) that it is not to see the light source.

5. Plane. I actually created a pure white plane to get the shadows to cast on something. At first I made it pretty small but the shadows from the spots are cutting at the edges of it so I made it pretty big so it covers the full rendering area. Having divisons on it is not nescessary or reccomended, I just did’nt cared.

6. Skylight : It is really important to create that skylight since it’s your fill light. Your image will be too dark if it’s not there, BUT you can place it pretty much everywhere since it does not actually cast a light from that direct point. This could be compared to a sun day light. Here’s the settings : (you can play a bit with it for the brightness and ambient color. See that I actually changed it from light blue to pure white and changed the multiplier to 0.4 to get it less bright)

We should be pretty much done for the lighting part. This was actually the hardest part!
Now we just want to assign a Mental Ray material to our object. If you actually did the two other tutorials, your UVWs should be all set and you should have a material already setted up for the scanline renderer.
Just click on another material slot and click “Get material”. In the new window you should pick Arch and Design under the mental ray section :

Once you have that Arch and Design applied, in your material editor, scroll down to the general maps and add the map you created from the tutorial into the diffuse color map, just like below :

You can now try to render it out. It should be pretty good. For a little adjustment, I went in the render setup again (F10) and changed a couple things under the renderer tab. Here’s what I used :

Go in the common tab and change the resolution to something you want. I got it to 1920×1080 but you can choose what you want dependaing on your needs and on your computer.
We’re done! You can now render and it should be just like my own final result :

3ds max beginner rendering tutorial soccer ball

1 Comment

1. 

   Reply By Mathew on April 24, 2012

   Thank you again! All three done. All three were really good as I never once struggled. Also I liked how they were done in three different ones it made it more bite sized for me to do. As when I see a massive page of tasks I feel a bit over cumbered.