MR Global Lighting

I followed a tutorial from ‘www.lynda.com’ that taught me about Mental Ray Global Lighting, this is good for bouncing light around the room off objects.
For this tutorial I used a scene of a room that I created last semester, I added a small lamp to this scene for the purpose of this tutorial, I then added an ‘Omni’ light to the scene and placed it where a light bulb would go in the light,


I then changed the renderer the same way as I done before, I changed it to ‘Mental ray Renderer’ this time,
Here is a shot of the original scene with default lighting and default renderer,



Now here is the scene with the ‘omni’ light in it and rendered using the ‘Mental ray Renderer’



As you can see the scene is very dark with little light touching the other objects within the scene.

In the ‘render setup’ window I selected the ‘Indirect Illumination’ tab, I then selected the ‘Global Illumination’ checkbox to turn it on. This works by using photons to illuminate the scene, so the more photons I adjust form these settings the better the global illumination will work on the scene, for this render I am keeping the ‘photon’ setting to default which is 500, I kept the photons at 500 and there was no change so I played around with the settings a little more and here is the outcome,

Still not the outcome I was hoping for to be honest, it has brightened up the walls behind and part of the cake a bit more, but nothing hugely impressive and you still can’t see half of the scene as it’s in darkness.
Also there are specs in the scene that should not be there, this is because the sample rate is too low, so in the next scene I fix this.

Still not the outcome I was hoping for to be honest, it has brightened up the walls behind and part of the cake a bit more, but nothing hugely impressive and you still can’t see half of the scene as it’s in darkness.
Also there are specs in the scene that should not be there, this is because the sample rate is too low, so in the next scene I fix this.

No specs as visible in this render, but I think the scene is still too dark at the front, so to fix this if it was my actual scene I would add another light from the camera view to the front of the scene and brighten up the light in the background and maybe reposition it.

Mental Ray Caustics,

This is good to used in a scene for glass or water. It deals with reflection, refraction and opacity.