I keep on hearing about this or that Mental Ray shader, that does , what are these shaders?
Mental Ray shaders are a big part of Mental Ray’s power. Unlike the normal use of the word ‘shader’ that you probably know about, describing a material that looks like concrete, or grass or whatever, Mental Ray shaders can do many more things than these traditional shaders. A shader in Mental Ray could still make something look like grass, but it could also create a light! Or create geometry! It could change the lens on your Maya camera, or apply an effect like fog or depth blur to your scene. Mental Ray shaders basically make up most of your scene. Of course, you don’t really need to know that because Maya takes care of most of these shaders in the translation of your Maya scene at render-time. However, if there’s an effect or look that you need to achieve, and Maya doesn’t already have a feature for it, say for example Sub-Surface Scattering, Ambient Occlusion or a a Telephoto Lens (sorry for the technical terms, more on them later), a Mental Ray shader can often come to the rescue.
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