Rendering with mental ray & 3ds Max

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.

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.

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 might be lacking by a small amount is the clarity in how the shaders and materials are explained. Very detailed in some places, but I found myself going back and forth from the book to the material editor to try to follow along and understand what was being explained. In the end, I learned a good deal but there were times too when I was confused by what seemed like contradictory facts, or at least I found them to be so. Like how the arch materials diffuse,reflection and transparency channels could not exceed a value of 1 when added together, yet I saw many materials constructed where those three channels added up to 3. The materials still worked as described, but I am the type that needs to understand the nitty-gritty before I feel comfortable with something. Oh well. But all-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. All I can say is, Good job, Mr. Van der Steen. Yes, very good job.

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!!