Realize your vision with stunning renders of your 3ds Max projects that can only be achieved with a powerful engine like mental ray. Beginning with a concise review of the essential concepts, you proceed to step-by-step tutorials that teach you how to render scenes with indirect light or with specific effects, such as depth of field and motion blur. Contour line shading and various other mental ray features are presented in detail, then you learn how to use the different light types of 3ds Max inside mental ray and how to use mental rays own specific area lights and its new daylight system. Finally, the book reviews mental rayspecific materials and what effects can be obtained by using most of the specific mental ray shaders.

Key Features:
* Color reproductions illustrate a wide array of subtle techniques.
* Contains never-before-published information about how shaders work
* Companion CD-ROM includes tutorial project files

Formally trained as a civil engineer, Joep has worked in computer animation and visualization for 15 years. Recent years have been devoted to sales and training for 3ds Max and Viz within the Benelux countries. As an extension of his training activities Joep founded an internet support portal (www.3dstudio.nl) with related tutorials and models, and annually teaches a high school level course on the fundamentals of 3ds Max. Joep mastered mental ray rendering by repeatedly throwing himself into its cold deep waters without water wings.

Realize your vision with renders that can only be achieved with a powerful engine like mental ray. Practical examples get you using mental ray quickly. Practical examples get you using mental ray quickly. Get the simple explanation of how shaders work, and learn how to integrate mental ray features including, lights, materials. True global illumination, ambient/reflective occlusion, caustics, sub-surface scattering, and more are within easy reach with this accessible guide to mental ray.

Key Features:
* Color reproductions illustrate a wide array of subtle techniques.
* Contains never-before-published information about how shaders work
* Companion CD-ROM includes tutorial project files

buen libro no tecnico pero si muy grafico

es un libro con algunos conceptos tecnicos sobre mental ray, iluminacion global, final gather, caustica y ambient occlusion..basicamente trabaja con los shaders qeu el programa trae consigo..y los que trae mental ray... algunos buenos trucos visuales...no abunda en detalles tecnicos pero si presenta ejemplos paso a paso y se entiende rapido. recomiendo el libro para los fanaticos del mental ray!!

how to climb a mountain

Whenever you need to learn a new program, it tends to present itself as a huge mountain to climb. Mental Ray is no different. The lack of documentation comming with this Autodesk program makes climbing this mountain a sheer impossible task. Not with this book. Joep van der Steen takes you by the hand and showes you the paths. He does this by starting of with standard scene’s and presets. Then with every tutorial he goes more and more into the details. Step by step you feel more and more at home with the program. Allready half way the book you have a good idea how to work with Mental Ray. But it goes on with more and more easy explanation of complicated stuff. The mountain turns out to be a joy to climb

Very Good to get you moving in the right direction

This book was extremely helpful to me as it relates to MR renders and what the various parameter do in the render dialog box. That part is worth more than 5 stars. The place it is lacking is in the MR shaders and maps. I would have liked to see more detail here. After all what is the power in MR without the MR mats? But al-in-all this book is well worth it. It will take a lot of the guess work and trail-and-error out of your MR renders. Good job Mr. Van der Steen.

Yes, good job.

The Book I Should Have Bought First Up

I’ve purchased several books on using mental ray and 3ds and this is the one I should have bought at the start. The author guides you through the process of using mental ray with 3ds Max, explaining and illustrating in the book what you’ll see on your own computer. While setting up a rendering using mental ray is not difficult, its settings can appear daunting to both the beginner and the more experienced user. Joep goes through all of mental rays major settings in order to set up a rendering. Further, he explains how to use Final Gather alone or together with Global Illumination to achieve optimal results. This is something that not many authors do in the same depth, if at all. He also explains what each important mental ray setting means and how small changes to them affect your scenes.
A variety of interesting and different models are used throught the book and come on the accompanying CD, which is a very nice touch and so much better than the normal practise of doing everything with one or two boring models - this book is aimed at stimulating your senses through its presentation.
The author goes much further than simply setting up mental ray by covering the shaders that are included with 3ds Max and there is something in this book for just about any 3ds Max user, no matter what their level of experience. Using it as a reference will enable you to produce the renderings you’ve always dreamed about; and it will do so by increasing your understanding of mental ray. In the end it’s the authors knowledge and explanations of how mental ray does things that makes this such a worthwhile and valuable reference.

A great buy for anyone who want sto get to grips with mr and max9 !

For anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding of mental ray within 3ds max (version 9) then this book is a great buy. It has many useful examples and tips for getting the best from mental ray.

However, do not expect it to take all the work out for your own projects, even with this book you will still spend hours tweaking away!

Accesible and complete

Very handy guide to Mental Ray. Much of this book is outlined in the Mental Ray user reference that comes with Max, but it’s nice to have at arms length when questions arise.

Great service and fast delivery

Book came in great shape and very fast shipping thank you very much. i am very saticified

Un buen libro para comenzar con mental ray

Escribo en castellano porque entiendo que hay mucha gente que se encontrara en la misma situacion que yo. La verdad que con saber muy poco de ingles, y conociendo el 3d studio en ingles, se entiende muy bien éste libro. Aclaro, es para el 3d studio 9, y sirve, sobre todas las cosas para los que estan arrancando con el mental ray... muy buenos consejos para ahorrar tiempo en renderizados, todo tipo de shaders, por ahi falta realismo, pero eso se logra animandose un poco mas que lo que dice el libro. Otro consejito, si sos de argentina, NO DUDES EN COMPRARLO POR CURRIER!!!!!!!!! Yo lo encargue por el otro envio, el del medio, y quedo en correo argentino, y me cobraron impuestos!!!!! por mas que sean libros, te cobran igual, asique ni lo pienses, por unos dolares mas te llega mas rapido y mas barato...

Be careful not working for earlier revisions,,just for 3ds Max 9

I have just received the book and start to read and really liked it. And then the big disappointment came: the exercises do not start up. I have 3ds Max 7 and tried to figure out what the problem could be, why the dll’s are not found. After some time I have started to search on the internet what the problem could be? And I have found the the review placed here by somebody unfortunatelly just on the 20th of May 2007.I have received the book already by that time:-(.I can not tell you how disappointed I was/am. The book seemed so good, at least the intro, but I felt cheated by the author not stating in the title that works just with 3dsmax revision 9 and not stated on the CD either ,so opening the CD I lost the chance to send back the whole stuff. I was so angry on the author. Did he do it deliberately just to sell more books? Why he couldn’t do the excercises in an earlier revision? Also I was annoyed because he thanked for everybody for creating this book but not giving any e-mail where he could be reached. I tried to go to the WEBpage stated in the book the chaosgroup, but I have to be registered to send him a mail. And guess what none of the free e-mail provider addresses (hotmail, freemail etc) are accepted. This is the first site that I found like this.
So the author is well hidden.
I give one start to this book just because I felt cheated by not stating the revision of the SW in the title and this mislead me. Yeah I can download the max9 trial and then feel stressed that I have just one month to go through everything. I might do it one day but now I am too angry to just open the book once again.
Also be careful the Relaistic Architectural Visualization with 3DS max and mental Ray has the same "childsickness" files work just with 3DS max 9 -I have found now the reviews on that book also. The author is not the same but the publisher is.

A great book for learning mental ray for 3ds max9

Well, when I first seen the advertisement for the this book. I was looking for something to better understand mental ray renderer and its materials and shaders. Joep The author does a good job of breaking things down to get a better understanding of mental ray rendering and its shaders and materials.

one thing I would caution is that this book and the files on the cd that come with it are for 3ds max 9 . I didn’t see this anywhere in the book itself or on this page describing the book contents. but I was able to download the trial version of 3ds max 9 and use it (30 days). the book also talks about arch and design material which are great and render a lot faster than the mental ray material and shaders. and need little or no tweeking at all.
if you are looking for a book to help you write script for materials or shaders for mental ray this is not the book for you. with the new arch and design you do not need to.

If it wasn’t for a file for a tutorial that was missing that I was able to get from the author himself through e-mail and a couple other areas that seen to be missing a step in a tutorial. I would probably give this a 5 star rating because I learn a great deal from this book and the author was very helpful in explaining somethings in the book that I didn’t fully understand in certain section of the book (through e-mail). what the heck, I am going to give it 5 stars. HA!

though I do believe the second print will be even better.

Bryan

Good Reference mr Book

This a book that can help you understand how mental ray works. The tutorials are easy to follow, some take sometime to render specially when rendering the final images, but that’s obvious since mental ray it’s very computer intensive. The author covers pretty much every shader of mr; there’s an explanation of each one, a simple tutorial to follow and understand what the parameters alters the render, also covers indirect illumination using GI and FG, used alone and together.

The only part that I didn’t like is the tutoria of caustics by reflection, after completing the render they didn’t look realistic as i was hoping... but as in almost book out there, there are things to do by yourself and do trial and error renderings until you get the result that you like.

So if are new to mental ray, this book can help you out on understanding this powerful render engine, how it works, what it can do, what things need to be considered before applying shaders; the author made a book that’s easy to read, lots of pictures of reference in full color so there’s no way you can get lost while playing with the parameters within max.