Final Gather Min Max Radius

[axiomatic]

If you're using maya 8.5+ then you probably want to be using accuracy and point density/interpolation instead of radius control (in most circumstances anyway). It's faster than radius method so that might be why your render times went up? Some details about these settings here:

http://toi.bk.tudelft.nl/toi-pedia/index.php?title=Rendering_Mental_Ray:_Final_Gather


Otherwise, i think max radius is your scene size for purposes of calculating luminosity, so unless you want rays bouncing off your 4000 radius dome then you'd be using car scale (including ground plane). So something like max 0.5, min 0.05 (or 5, 0.5 depending on scale etc).

[Bitter]

Typically, the easiest way is to let mental ray just do it for you. I haven't quite figured out why people whip out the measurement tool.

Do a render with the radius values at 0.000. Have verbosity set to at least "Info messages" and render a frame. mental ray calculates the values internally based on the scene extent and the min is usually 10% of the max. It gets output for you. However, that is not a requirement. They can be independant of one another. Start there and tweak.

But the previous post is correct, if you are in a newer version that uses interpolation, use that instead. Interpolation and Density are a direct means of controlling the points as opposed to the radius values which are a bit of indirect control.

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