Introduction to mental ray

These are the final renders saved directly from Maya for the introduction to rendering course.

Part way through, on the tutorial for gamma color correcting, I think I messed something up. My renders came out very washed out all the time, though now looking at these pictures it doesn't look as bad. I think the renderer was showing it as one output and saving it may have disregarded that. The dropdown in the render view was set to sRGB gamma which I believe it always is, but since the settings have changed between the tutorial and now, I must have messed something up deeper in the settings. Also, evidently the saving from Maya does not take the background. That might be a setting I left unchecked.

Here's a mia_material with reflectivity so that at an angle, you can see the skyline. The skyline was also visible in the top half when I rendered this.

The previous two were working with area lights, using unified sampling, and detailing how to reduce noise as well as some other things. Again, the background was not white in the render.

This was about where the renders started coming out very washed out, but they don't seem as bad in these pictures. I'm not sure what's up.

This one as well looks decently good but in the render view on Maya, it looked very washed out and noisy.

This is from the lesson on rendering displacement maps. It looks really good.

The previous two were pictures from the section on image based lighting. The lighting appeared to stay, yet the image is gone.

This is from the video on making caustics patterns and again, no background image and the image itself looks far less washed out than it did on my render view. 

this is from the lesson on subsurface scattering which came out looking good in my render view. Not sure why this one chose to come out okay, but either way, I gave up on the last two since they were so washed out and didn't look very much like the finished results from the instructor.

I liked learning about mental ray, because it's what I always render in in Maya. It's good to know more tricks about it to make things look more photorealistic. One thing I wish this had addressed though, is if there is a way to make a realistic night sky using the realistic sun and sky. I will be looking that up myself.