mental ray for Maya, 3ds Max, and XSI: A 3D Artist's Guide to Rendering (Boaz Livny)

3ds Max rendering is important for me, and i love CG art very much, thanks, great book !
http://www.foxrenderfarm.com/

Boaz Livny is a great teacher, the book is very advanced, technically helpful and very accurate. I suggest it to anybody who wants to understand and start using Mental Ray.

I am fairly new to the CG game, going on about 9 months. I think this book is a great resource because it explains some of the lesser discussed topics in Mental Ray very thoroughly. I really enjoyed the background in Light Theory (how light is measured, how it travels, etc) and the background and explanation behind what you see when press the render button.

Some of the topics discussed in this book that are hard to find elsewhere are:
-Physical sub-surface scattering
-Participating Media effects such as Volumetric fog
-In depth analysis of every mental ray node and what function is carried out when the node is activated.

I thought this book was a bit daunting at first, but once I got through the first couple chapters (Precursors, and a tad boring) I found myself really enjoying reading the book. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in enhancing their current knowledge of rendering in mental ray. It is also one of the only books on the subject besides the more complex books by mental images.

Despite the effort it has taken to read this book cover to cover; I could not have done it any other way.

The book is designed to let you jump around, but I wanted to have a full understanding of 'mental ray'. That said, much of this is over my head. Though I am a digital artist, I don't dabble much in code, but the great thing about this book is that its a balance of theory, code, and how to.

When something is wrong in my Mental Ray render, I may not know exactly what's wrong, but now I have an idea of possible culprits. I recommend this to any serious digital artist who uses Mental Ray.

I had been using mental ray for rendering for a long time but I still wasn't very clear on some of the principles of use. After reading this book I understood mental ray far better. The concepts are explained very clearly and it goes through the algorithms in great depth. Its too difficult for a beginner but somebody who is already experienced in mental ray and has a strong background in computing will find this book extremely helpful. The book showed me many more possibilities of use and improved my rendering quality. I love this book and highly recommend it.

This is the first mental ray book I've found that clearly explains the options available in mental ray and how to tune those options. My only suggestion is that the author should put a concise list of real world materials and their corresponding lighting model(e.g. refractions that go through severel different materials(glass and water) with different IOR - dielectric shading model). I know these examples are supplied in the text but they are not in a central location.