LAmrUG

Los Angeles mental ray^® User Group

Agenda

7:00-7:30PM Registration/Refreshments/Raffle Entry
7:30-7:45PM Introduction
7:45-8:15PM Maya 5 Presentation with Demo
8:15-8:30PM Break/Refreshments
8:30-9:30PM Concepts and Terminology in mental ray
9:30-10:00PM (spilled over into) Open Discussion

Notes

During the "initial gathering"(thanks, ACK), we enjoyed the snacks and refreshments, including veggies, chips, beer and pizza. This was also the time to put your name in for the mental ray^® Handbook series raffle, and the Maya Techniques DVD Using mental ray for Maya. A good group of 60 or so people showed and filled the room into which we moved for the presentation.

The introduction began with Cliff Edson from RFX, who also pointed out Pam Hogarth from Gnomon. She mentioned that the school is introducing a new course on using mental ray from Maya (taught by Matt Hartle, who's been using it for over 6 months in production). From Alias|Wavefront, we had Joe Meldrum and Marcel deJong.

Marcel launched into new features in Maya 5, showing the multitude of new paint effects and how to use them to create geometry. [Geometry, which can BTW be rendered directly in mental ray and take advantage of subpixel displacement. -bjg]. He also showed the new pond/wave effects which can take into account objects floating in the fluid. Using the Ocean Shader, he showed the new organization of Render Globals, how mental ray is included in the list of Maya Software, Maya Hardware, mental ray, and Maya Vector. Common global properties are located in the Common Tab, and each renderer has a tab for its specific globals.

Joe confirmed that two CPU licenses of mental ray will come bundled with Maya 5 Complete, listed at just under $2,000, so it covers the typical dual proc workstation configuration.

In the second half of the night, Bart Gawboy presented Concepts and Terminology of mental ray for Maya users. We noticed a few people copying the diagrams in the slides, so we thought we'd post up an html version for your reference. The primary reference for these slides was the book Rendering with mental ray (2nd ed.). Most of the diagrams were taken out of the book, but the 2D depiction of the photon map came from Jos Stam's Photon map page [which I can no longer find on the web -bjg].

We ran long, and after much discussion, we finally held the raffle drawing. We also promised a link to the Maya Techniques DVD mental ray for Maya. Just go to the A|W Store Page and click on the image of the Using mental ray for Maya picture on the lower right of the four featured products.