Photorealism with Mental Ray - Week 03

This week we worked with a "Mirror Ball" image and the Mental Ray Matte Shader material. With the Mirror Ball, the reflections only work if the object is in the exact spot that you shot the mirror ball.(or close enough) The reflections are off in the animation but I was still happy. l like what little effect I could get right and hope to learn how to execute this properly in the future.


This is a couple of screen grabs stacked into one image so you can get a better idea of how much of the scene was really CG. As you can see the only pieces built in 3D were the ball and the plane that it interacts with through Dynamics and Raytracing

Here is the final product of the animation with Mirror Ball Environment and Matte Shader Raytrace reflections.

My Light Pencil

Wouldn't it be cool if a crayon made of light
fell out of the sky.
Like a star bored of space hoping for a little
mischief.

Photorealism with Mental Ray - Week 02

This week we concentrated on Fresnel Reflections, refractions, Chromatic Aberrations, Specular + Glossy Highlights, Brushed Metal, White Balance, wave lengths and visible spectrum. There is more but its just getting redundant listing all these topics.

Using MIB Blinn Mental Ray Shader node


Using MIB CookTorr Mental Ray Shader node


Simple Brushed Metals method


Mib_Blinn + Mib_Reflect + Mib_CookTorr --> Mib_Mix_Color Shader

Photorealism with Mental Ray - Week 01

This was the class work from the 1st week of my on line course
"Photorealism with Mental Ray"

Here you are looking at a Spherical/Environment Map projected through the camera for the background, and then a blurred version of that map is projected onto the ball. There is a floor plane that is reflecting the sphere and has a bump to give the reflection qualities similar to the water.






Sphere Shading Group


Floor Shading Group(reflection)


Camera with Environment Map(background)