Gone Mental!
 

Mental ray is awsome!
heres the first (succesful) render

FGrays=500
min-0.8
max-8

Render time 30 mins

Looks nice, but is it supposed to be so green?

I think Sinbad when I see this.:beer:

oh nice, but one advice - you mapped your (hdri ??) reflection not correctly. and the shadows are missing. but nice ring and chain model :)

Looks awesome. But could someone please explain in lamens terms, in one sentence, what exactly is mental ray?!?!?

Mental Ray is a renderer which you can use with maya.

Disclaimer: This may be slighlty wrong, but it will give you som idea.

The mental ray renderer, gives you the ability to use FinalGather, GlobalIllumination, Caustics and ordinary raytrace renderings.

FG (final gather) is a way to calculate the light in a scene, where every surface becomes a source of light, as the light is reflected and bounces off surfaces everywhere.

Gl is a way to send out a given amount of photons which light up the surface, wherever the photon hits it. Using GI alone may produce some artifacts as the number of photons may be insufficient to get into all those corners and such.

FG and GI can be combined. I have yet to try this.

Caustics, well I don't know much about it, but I guess it is a way to calculate how light passes through materials such as glass for instance, and then how it scatters onto other surfaces beyond the glass.

I cannot tell if mental ray is any better or worse than the next renderer, neither in quality or speed.

damn, sorry, didn't know i had replies, no emails :confused: received, thanx for comments, UndSeth- blue, green, pink yellow, didnt really matter it was just an attempt at the HDRI reflection Which apparently i've done wrong says BabyDuck- i thought i was to just map the image spherically onto the poly half sphere???, it's attached to the ambient and color node (how can ya tell its wrong?), as for the shadows... i havent quite got the hang of that yet so i left em 'simple'