Final Gathering Questions
 

Hi, I'm playing around with Mental Ray Final Gathering in MAYA 7.0, and I had a few questions about it, hope you guys can help.

1. How high should your FG Rays be? I read somewhere that 1000 is a lot, but another tutorial I saw pumped his up to 10,000 for a simple kindergarten-like chair and table scene.

2. There are times when I render and it looks pretty good even without the me adjusting the Min and Max Radius. Do I leave it as is then? Or do I put my own values? When do you adjust the min and max radius?

3. Also if you're rendering large formats, say larger than letter size and 200+ dpi, do you need to increase the FG Rays and min and max values?

Please check out my Sword in the Finished Work forum and tell me what you think. Comments and suggestions welcome.

Thanks!

Calvin
:cool:

1. fg rays differs from scene to scene, and there is no absolute number but of course the higher the number the smoother the renders look but also the longer it take to render.
2. min and max radius can also reduced render time a bit (im assuming you are talking about the min and max radius under the final gather tab) i heard from somewhere that the min and max radius has to do with your scene size so 10% of the size of your scene goes to the max radius and 10% of the max is your min radius.
3.fg rays yes min and max values i dont think so

Thanks younglion. :) Another thing, how do you measure scene size? Do you measure diagonally from point to point like you do a monitor? A 17" monitor means its 17 inches from the upper right corner to the lower left corner, is it the same with FG? o_O

you can use the measure tool in maya,then go to any of the orthographic views. zoom out and click on one end of the scene and click on the other end then you'll see the size.

Thanks again. I'll try that out. :)

min and max radius do have to do with distance and near to 10% of distance, but not of the whole size of the scene, just the size of the area you're rendering.