Making Convincing Reflective Shaders in 3DS Max 7.5 and up using the Mental Ray Render

This is what you should get.

Lets set up an HDRI so that the balls have something to reflect.

-Press 8 to bring up the environment panel

-Click “None” and choose bitmap. Find the kitchen.hdr.

-Change the white point to .7 and press OK.

-Drag this map into a blank material as an instance and name it HDRI map.

-Change the mapping to spherical environment.

-Go down to the output rollout and change the output amount to 2.

-Give this a test render.

Lets get some color bouncing around.

-Press F10 to open the render dialog box and go to indirect illumination.

-Go down to the final gather rollout and to the trace depth section. Set the max bounces to 3.

give this a test render.

Lets brighten those reflection a bit more.

-Go back to the Output rollout of the HDRI map in the material editor and change the RGB level to 2.

Lets get a better render

-Press F10 and set the output size to 800x600

-Go to the renderer tab and change the minimum samples to 4 and the the maximum to 16.

-Go to indirect illumination to the final gather rollout and change the samples to 200. Uncheck preview (No Precalculations).

Give this a render.

ADVERTISE

Ok so I'm still not happy with the final render. I want the bright reflections to be more apparent. Lets change the way the HDRI works to get what we are looking for.

-Press 8 to open the environment dialog box. Click the kitchen.hdr and choose bitmap. Find the kitchen.hdr.

-In the internal storage area choose the “Real Pixels (32 bpp)” option and check Def. Exposure. Hit OK.

-Drag that map to the HDRI map material we made in the materials editor and make it an instance. (we are just going to overwrite the old one because we don't need it anymore)

-In the coordinates rollout change the mapping to spherical environment.

-Go down to the output rollout and change the RGB level to 2.75

-Give this a render.

Now it looks much better. For my final render I used a skylight set to 1.2 for a little more brightness and corrected the contrast and colors with photoshop.

Note: If you want to use a skylight for your final render it doesn't need to be placed anywhere special because of the way this light works.

Thanks for Reading my tutorial and I hope you enjoyed it.