How I further enhanced my skills in Mental Ray by studying ‘Learning Maya | Mental Ray for Maya’ (Review)
For a while now I have been studying this training DVD from Alias|LearningTools. I have worked through all the examples in this DVD and I can highly recommend it for anyone who wants to understand how to use Mental Ray for practical applications.
The Instructors are really good, Ashraf Aiad does a good job covering the settings and workflow and how to get rendering using Mental Ray. The tips and tricks on how to modify setting values and where to start and how to increase values starting from a low value and only changing one setting at the time has helped me to increase my efficiency when working with Mental Ray rendering. The concepts of Global Illumination, Final Gathering and High Dynamic Range Imaging are covered, and I have now gained better theoretical knowledge about these areas.
The only minus I would give this Training DVD, is that it doesn’t play in a normal DVD-player, you have to extract a .zip file from the disc and the go through a rather tedious installation process. I would prefer the content wasn’t compressed and that they would remove the need of installing a lot of data to your computer! Apart from this minor issue it’s a great product.
Rating: 4 / 5 stars
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