Where is the "Online Mental Ray Reference Guide"?

[Jozvex]

From inside Maya:

Press F1 > Reference (under Browse Sections) > Mental Ray Reference (from the left frame)

[Jakobud]

Sweet thats exactly what I was looking for! Thanks

[Stychentyme]

Jozvex,....

I checked out your Final Gather tut, and it really helped me, thanks.

I wanted to ask you about the speed of the renders, though. I'm using an IBM Intellistation, 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 with 1 gig of RAM and an NVidia Quadro 4 NVS graphics card.

I tried to re-create your scene as closely as I could, but where you had render times of 10-15 seconds or so, I had render times of 35-40 seconds. I had the same settings and one directional light.

I was wondering if you knew of any way to speed that up. My computer seems pretty powerful, 1 gig of RAM and all, but I'm not sure. Is Maya using enough RAM? Is there a way to get it to use more? How would I do that?

If you can offer any advice, I'd love to hear it.

Thanks.

[Jozvex]

I'm glad it helped you! :thumbsup:

Hmm, I'm not sure why your rendertimes are so long. I checked my scene again today and it still rendered in like 10 seconds. Maya should use as much memory as it needs without help...

My specs are lower than yours:

Athlon XP 1800+ (1533 mhz)
768 meg of DDR ram
nVidia GeForce 3 Ti 200

I've attached my scene file that I just checked (it's for Maya 5), try rendering from it and see what speed you get. That way we can find out if it's your scene, or your computer that's slowing things down. :surprised

Oh, and hopefully by the end of the day (for me), I'll have finally created a new tutorial.......Final Gathering 2. It's got some new speed boosting tips and some things people have requested.

[Stychentyme]

Thanks for the scene file,.... it cleared up right away what was the problem,...... I was rendering in 640x480 instead of 320x240. So, it wasn't my machine,.... it was me.

When I rendered your file, I got the same time as you,....about 10 seconds. When I re-rendered my scene at 320x240, it rendered at about 9 seconds.

I'm looking forward to your new tutorials. I want to thank you for formatting your tuts so they could be printed. I'm not sure if that was intentional on your part, but sometimes it's nice to have printed copies to study while you're not at the computer.

Some other tutorials I've found on the web get cut off at the sides when printing.

Thanks again for all your help.

[Jozvex]

Ahh 640x480, I thought that might be the case. Did you get the idea I was rendering at that size from the tutorial?

About the printer friendliness, that's just luck hehe. But now that you mention it I'll try and keep 'printer friendliness' in the back of my mind in future. :thumbsup:

Thanks!

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