Rendering an interior scene in Mentalray

                 

                                  In this tutorial I'm going to talk about how to render an interior scene in Maya and mentalray using an area light. Also this method can be use in Maya 2013 or older version but you have to careful with the mentalray settings. In here I'm going to use Legacy Sampling method without any mentalray lights and nodes.
                         First open you scene and place the light. In here I'm using an area light. If your light is too small comparing to your scene, you have to scale it until it fits to your light model.

                          Then open the attributes editor and go to raytrace shadow attributes. Set shadow rays to 12 and ray depth limit to 4. Go to Area Light section. Enable the Use Light Shape. Set high samples to 64, high sample limit to 8 and low samples to 4. To get better result, you have to increase high samples.
                           Put a tic on Visible and Emit Photons. Increase photon intensity to 100000. This value is depends on your scene scale. I have scale my models to actual measurements, so 100000 is fine for me. Set Global illumination photons to 500000. This value is also depends on the scene scale.

                       Open the render settings window. Set sampling mode to Legacy Sampling mode. Set min sample level to 3 and max sample level to 4. Under Sample Options choose Mitchell for the Filter and increase the filter size.

                         Then enable the Global Illumination and Final gathering. Under final gathering quality, set filter to 1. No need to modify other values in final gather and global illumination. Default values are fine.

                          You can enable Ambient occlusion for better results. If you are using caustics, you have to mess with caustics photons which is little bit difficult for beginner. If your scene is too dark, Increase the light intensity.