Using Global Illumination to render your images can return very accurate images. As you adjust photons shooting from your lights they will hit objects in your scene. The final photon map is used in the calculation of the total scene irradiance. This is a great video to learn how to use the powerful features of mental ray Global Illumination.

Final Gathering is technique of lighting your scene without any lights. This form of rendering takes uses the colors of objects in the scene to illuminate the other objects in this scene. This video teaches you how to render the scene with one plane and no lights!

One major rumor about using mental ray is that it takes too long. This video will show you how to speed up your render times and get very good results without having to wait for them.

To give the ultimate in photo realism you will want your colors to bleed when near diffused objects. This video teaches you how to subtly bleed the red skin of our character onto the floor. This is a perfect video to teach you how to combine the power of Final Gathering and Global Illumination together.

The use of High Dynamic Range Images (HDRI) in rendering and the computation of Final Gathering is now a baseline technique used by many in the industry. This technique uses an image to light the scene so in theory you can take a picture of the set you are working on and then create your objects use the picture to illuminate the scene.

This lesson walks you through the steps necessary to convert light probe images found on the internet into panoramic images to be used in Maya. We'll use a program called HDRI Shop for our conversion.

Using the new contour shading integration we'll show you how to render your images with contour lines that give the look of wire frame renders.

This video covers how to send out a batch animation to be rendered as contour lines to be used in an animation where you need a little texture of a moving object.

Rendering Fur in mental ray is achieved by making adjustments on your fur nodes. Maya now allows you to have the fur calculate in the reflections and refractions.

One of the main reasons people use mental ray to render their images is to take advantage of caustics. Caustics calculate how the light is concentrated after passing through or reflecting off of objects. This method of rendering can give you very accurate results of light patterns. This video teaches you how to activate and create a fully rendered image using caustics including how to set up the total ray count in the ray tracing objects.

This lesson takes you through the process of using the Dielectric node to calculate how the surface reacts to light. You can see that the glass and liquid are very realistic and creates some of the most realistic results. This lesson will open the door to connecting mental ray shaders to Maya shading engines or shader groups.

Using the approximation editor in mental ray will give you the power to control how the renderer reacts to surfaces and displacement maps. This lesson teaches you how to control the renderings using the approximation editor to increase tessellation around areas that have a lot of detail. The final result will be a very accurate looking class dish.

This lesson covers a large number of techniques including how to use area lights to get soft shadows, physical light shader to simulate accurate lighting information in your scene and techniques used to achieve sub-surface scattering in objects like jade or wax. This lesson is actually five lessons combined into one project and focuses on issues you will face when rendering your images using custom nodes.

When creating bump maps you can't use the Maya bump node when using custom material shaders. A work around is to create the network yourself and plug it into the specular attribute of your mental ray material node. This video is deep and will cover how to connect your nodes together to create the information needed to be plugged into the specular channel.

To speed up your renders and still take advantage of mental ray you may need to bake the illumination information into your objects. This technique will give us the look of Final Gathering but use the hardware render to get almost instant results!