Beginning with mental ray
 

Howdy, thought I should test out mental ray. Did a quick render and it was ok. Then I changed some settings and now I get noise in most textures. Can not find out what I did to cause. Is there a good way to reset the render settings for mental ray to default?

BTW are there any good novice mental ray tutorials?

There are presets that you can check to reset mental ray to default settings. I am assuming that you changed something in the global mental ray settings. If you changed something at the component level then I am not sure what the best way to set those back to default short of exporting the model and re-importing it.

In maya 2010 the presets are under the quality tab of the global render settings panel.

Thank you CT. I have worked hard to figure it out myself and I think I got it now. It turned out now to be a problem with Mental Ray after all. I had silly enough raised the incandesence to a high enough level to blow out my shadows on a surface in order to have a slight bump mapping. I gotta figure out a better way to do a soft bump map that affects only the high light. Got any ideas for that?

Maybe a specular map? Not sure if that's what you're going for.

Specular map. No. I managed to solve it with a bump map. I had to fine tune the bump value and making by UVs cover more to make it smear out. Thank you for your help it steered me into the right path.