Where's the knowledge?
 

I'm really making an effort to learn how to use Mental Rays shaders and utilities but I haven't found a single book that makes sense out of it. All of my books just tell you to plug this into that and type this and set this to that but none of them explain what any of this means. I've recently purchased a book called "Rendering with Mental Ray" (Mental Ray handbooks Volume 1, 3rd edition) by T. Driemeyer because it was expensive and updated to cover Mental Ray 3.4 but as big and detailed as the book is, it doesn't seem to really explain much. At least not in terms that make sense to me. I need a book that dumbs it down a bit.

Do any of you guys know of a good source of info that really explains how to use Mental Ray? There are all kinds of tutorials on using HDRI and Final Gather and the likes but nothing that covers how to use all of those Mental Ray nodes..

Thanks!

best resource for me.

http://www.lamrug.org/index.html

Thanks, Vlad! I was hoping you'd have some info...

I am able to get the SSS simple skin shader to work until I try to add in a bump shader. After that the error messages start popping up saying things like; mentalrayTexture1 not referenced. I'm going to spend some time this week end trying to figure this thing out. I'm sure I have all the info that is needed. Now I just have to understand it..

Thanks again.