Realistic Architectural Visualization with 3ds Max and mental...

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 344 pages
• Published by: Focal Press
• Edition: 1st Edition April 15, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0240809122
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0240809120
• Book Dimensions: 9.9 x 7.5 x 1.1 inches
• Weighs: 1.9 pounds

Product Description
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.

Back Cover Copy
Bring new realism to your visualizations with a command of the mental ray toolset in 3ds Max. mental ray is made simple with an accessible description of its tools and workflows. You can learn the nuts and bolts of applying materials, lighting, and optimizing your renders.

Step-by-step tutorials lavishly illustrate the processes and techniques required to produce renderings of existing models. Interior and exterior projects demonstrate how to:
*Prepare materials for interior and exterior scenes in light-free enviornments for efficient rendering
* Light a daytime interior scene including indirect illumination, color bleeding, and mr lights
* Light a nighttime interior scene including light decay, lume shaders, exposure controls, and rendering light tests
* Light an exterior scene in daylight with mr Sun and mr Sky objects
* Create a hazy exterior setting with mr Physical Sky and an applied bitmap
* Efficiently work a complex scene to reserve time consuming complete renders for the end

Valuable appendices provide direction on trasnferring CAD files from AutoCAD and Revit to 3ds Max, creating caustics and flash effects, HDRI, Render passes and Bucket rendering, common errors and the process of creating the high resolution image as seen on the front cover.

Reader Reviews
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. Comment | | (Report this)