is a consultant and educator in the architectural community. He has been a professor at Vanier College and a training manager at Autodesk. He was led author on two Autodesk VIZ books, and a contributor to "3ds Max 8" and "3ds Max 9 Essentials."

has produced graphic design and 3d visualizations for professional organizations and companies since 1994. After a recent four year stint as a senior 3d artist/special effects designer for Carillion plc, he is currently working for GMJ Design Ltd., UK.

Bring new realism to your visualizations with a command of the 3ds Max toolset. Three step-by-step tutorials demonstrate exterior and interior, day and night lighting scenes. You learn the nuts and bolts of importing models from CAD programs, lighting, applying mr shaders and materials, and optimizing your renders. Mental ray is made simple with an accessible description of its tools.

* Color reproductions illustrate a wide array of subtle techniques.
* mental ray is made easy with accesible demonstations.
* Companion CD contains all of the project files.

Wonderful book

The book arrived brand-new, carefully packed, absolutely satisfy my need. Simply love Amazon’s way of business.

Realistic Architectural Visualization with 3ds Max and mental ray

This is really good choice for me. Detailed one project sutdy. Actually I learned a lot from this book. Before Mental Ray / Lighting in 3D’s Max was a puzzle for me. Know I really understand.

Thanks,
Regards,
SAQIB

Disappointing

Very Basic book, good for beginners, however for slightly advanced not much point. The knowledge i gained from this book personally could probably have been put into 30 pages or so. From a book like this perhaps the most important thing is to be inspired to go make something yourself, and the very low quality images do anything but. Not worth the money, try getting one from a library as i did, to see if it really is any help to you, even still i dont think it to be worth the money.

surprisingly good

After having read some mixed reviews about this book, I was not sure if this purchase would be another let down book about mental ray.
To my surprise it wasn’t. The Authors do explore areas of mental ray renderer that no another books did; for instance the flash light effect,common mental ray errors, render passes,day and night scenes.
Also, for the first time there is an author(jamie cardoso) who actually has a reputation for being good at what he does; as oppose to authors publishing other artist’s work. The way in which the tutorials are put together one can sense that there’s a lot of experience behind what’s been written.
Moreover,for the first time, as one renders the final scenes,the renders look as good as the front cover images without the need of further Photoshop tweaks.
Finally, it was good value for money in the sense that the 3d scenes are worth twice the book price. For these reasons I give this book 5 stars.

excellent book

At first I was reluctant to buy this book as the previous books about mental ray were not so helpful, as a 3ds max user. I have to confess that I was utterly surprised to find out that this book explores most areas of mental usage. Moreover, i was delighted to have seen for the first time a book that touches on the subject about common mental ray errors and how to overcome them. The flash light effect was another big surprise for me; especially as this technique has always been linked to Maxwell renderer. I give this book a 5 stars rating, on the basis of the amount of information/new techniques and the final renders of the tutorials looking exactly as a professional would have expected them to be,high quality(i.e. the cover image render).

Very disappointing book

If you are thinking about buying this, do yourself a favor and don’t bother. If you’re hoping to learn some insider tips and tricks to creating beautiful rendered images, you will be hugely disappointed. You will learn nothing more than if you had studied the help that accompanies Max 9, this is essentially because this is a cut and paste of the help that the author has made their own. The resulting images are of such poor quality that a novice would be forgiven for wondering what the big deal is with Mental Ray. As a seasoned user of 3ds Max with over 10 years experience, I am well aware of the amazing results that can be archived with Mental Ray, unfortunately you won’t learn how to do it by reading this book. All you do is work through repetitive, dull exercises culminating in a truly craptacular rendered image. The illustrations are so poor, that it is impossible to see the point of printing them (one is a screen grab of a blank screen - I kid you not!) Having studied many of these books over the years, this is by far the worst I have come across.

I expected more...

If you’ve never done any design viz before (and I mean NEVER) you might benefit from this book. My biggest beef is that 90% of this book’s content is laid out almost word for word in the Mental Ray tuts and user reference that ship with Max 9. At this price...hold off.

Realistic Architectural Visualization with 3ds Max and Mental Ray

You’ll need V9 and this is not for the beginner, but if you’re an intermediate user and need a fast track into producing better final renderings, this is ideal. He does repeat himself sometimes and a few of the images are not the best quality, but the screenshots of the Max UI are very clear (which is the important bit). The appendices could have been chapters instead (they take up a third of the book), but who cares, the information in them is very useful.

Not even close to realistic Architectural Visualization

I must admit that i am really dissapointed with this book. To me it seems like the author just took the reference help menu and made it his own. These renders are not even close to realism. I thought by buying this book, i would gain some confidance in the archviz field. Unfortunately that is not the case. I will have to look elsewhere to gain that confidance and to get a better book or dvd tutorial on archviz. I am not new to 3D. I have worked in 3D for 7 years using 3ds max, and Maya. This book is more accurate to be marketed towards beginners and not towards mid level or professionals.

Very Disappointing Book with Poor Presentation

The objective of Architectural visualization is to produce high quality photorealistic images. Unfortunately this book falls far short of achieving that objective. The illustrations throughout are a huge and major disappointment and printing photorealistic images with a semi mat finish kills the renderings stone dead. The book largely replicates the settings information available in the 3ds User Reference so you’re not going to learn any secret techniques that will make you a rendering expert with mental ray. I’d have to rate the presentation of this book as being at the bottom of the pile and given the blurb on the experience of the authors, I really expected something that set the bar a whole lot higher. The Appendix section on HDRI images and their use for lighting is woeful and the images are tinted with a orange/pink colour that leaves you wondering what the authors were trying to do as HDRI for lighting can produce truly spectacular renderings. Unfortunately you’re not going to learn how to do it using this book though your renderings may improve if your a total beginner. There is too much emphasis (and illustrations of) problem with mental ray renderings - one screen capture is a totally black box - that could have been described in a few sentences. Showing problems is not something that needs to be illustrated as that just wastes precious paper that could have been used to provide useful information. When combined with it’s ’tick this, change that setting’ approach of the authors, this book is a very unsatisfactory work that skips and skims over the workings of mental ray and its setting, which is probably something that more advanced users really want to know. What the authors tell you about mental ray can be found in the 3ds User Reference where it is clearly covered in about the same amount of detail. Readers are looking for snappy solutions for rendering with mental ray and unfortunately this book fails to deliver. As a reader I feel it’s a total let down. The DVD with the book contains the models and textures used throughout the book and these are welcome. A redeeming feature of the book are the screen captures for 3ds settings, which are very clear. If you’ve used mental ray in 3ds for any period of time then this book probably isn’t for you as it seems to be aimed more at novice users and those not totally familiar with the 3ds interface. The appendices take up one third of the book, which seems a bit excessive given that the book is supposed to be about producing high quality renderings with mental ray.

good book about architectural viz

This book was one i was hoping to get my hands on, since I saw it here at amazon in sept. 06, I pre-order it and 7 months later it was releases.

The book covers what you need to know about using mental ray in its latest realease v.3.5, things like materials, lights, shaders. Along the chapters you get useful tips when working with final gather and global illumination. I was actually hoping to get a more in depth cover in how to get beautiful materials, but it only covers a few such as wood, metal, leather, glass and cloth; but as in much books you get to understand how to use the parameters, and then it’s up to us in seeing reference materials to get the effect we want.

I recommend this book to those who have been working with mental ray and are in the architectural viz. business, mr is a very powerful render engine, it can stress your computer quite a bit, but the results are just beautiful. If you want to expand your knowledge on mental ray, I also suggest buying "rendering with mental ray & 3ds max" by Joep van der Steen (also for the release of 3ds max 9), having this 2 books in your power can make your renderings something very beautiful.

Be careful

to take notice that this will NOT work if you are not upto aleast 3dSMaxR9. I wish I had seen the above review befor doing the same exact thing. I have a feeling that we are not the only ones that fell for this. I’m sure the examples are great but I won’t know anytime soon. The authors are responsible for putting out accurate information within the pages but they are reaaaaly not clear right on the cover.

If you have Max9 get it. If you dont’ then don’t bother. (unless they release the same examples that are usable to all.)

Be warned: You must have 3ds Max version 9

With the limited number of more advanced books regarding architectural visualization for 3ds Max, I was really looking forward to getting this one. To my disappointment, none of the tutorial files on the dvd will open because I have 3ds Max version 8, not 9 which the files require.

I think it’s kind of misleading that there’s nothing written anywhere on the books cover or in the online summary saying that you need version 9 to do any of the tutorials. I wish I knew this before I dropped $50. What a bummer.

Otherwise, the book looks full of useful information that other beginnner books don’t get to. There’s even a good chunk of info in the appendix at the end of the book with very useful tips for those working in architectural visualization.

This book is going to look great next to the other Max books on my shelf. In the meantime, I’ll try to be patient until my employer can upgrade to version 9. Rrrr...