Mental ray Workflows in Maya 2015: Caustics

This tutorial will explain how to create and control the emission of caustic photosns into Maya scenes, and then render them using mental ray. The natural phenomenon of caustic light patterns is often overlooked. Understanding how to create these patterns of focused light is crucial to adding realism to your renders. We'll start by learning how to control photon emissions and photon energy entering our scene. We'll then learn how to control the colors of our caustic patterns. Photon interactions and ray interactions are crucial when using photons. We will learn how interactions can affect our caustic patterns, and how we can control them. We'll wrap up this mental ray training by looking at how to save and reuse a photonmap to speed up our render times. Software required: Maya 2015.