Occlusion in 3dsmax 7
This image is rendered at 640x470 pixel resolution on a dual opteron workstation with 3dsmax's native GI engine LightTracer in 14 minutes 27 seconds(with default parameters used, you can tell by the artifacts). It shouldn't be considered as a very long time for the GI rendering of a complex object like this car. But if I was to render a high quality animated sequence within a tight deadline, quarter an hour per frame will add up to a relatively long period of time.
Let's see how we can decrease the render time for this specific scene with ambient occlusion method in 3dsmax 7 using mental ray.
The scene has a simple setup. There is a ground plane with the car geometry placed in the middle and a spherical mapped gradient ramp is used in the environment slot to represent the sky background.
For the lighting, only one skylight is used to illuminate the scene with LightTracer and a couple of other point lights are used to create highlights on several places on the car body.
