Maya Tutorials - Mental Ray Part 8: Displacement Maps

I found this tutorial really interesting, it is amazing how much you can distort geometry with a displacement map.

Maya Tutorials - Mental Ray Part 11: Mental Ray Proxies

Very powerful tool that will make dense scenes easier to move around in Maya, I am sure that will be very useful when world building!

Maya Tutorials - Mental Ray Part 7: High Dynamic Range (HDR) Lighting

I found this tutorial interesting, it took a bit of time to set it all up but it gave some nice results.

Maya Tutorials - Mental Ray Part 10: Motion Blur

Motion Blur makes everything look better, I found it very useful how the shutter angle changed the motion blur and will definitely be keeping that in mind.

Maya Tutorials - Mental Ray Part 9: Ambient Occlusion

It was interesting to see different ways to add ambient occlusion, I can see how each would have their advantages and give slightly different results.

Maya Tutorials - Mental Ray Part 6: Mia Material X Shader

The presets offer a lot of cool effects, I can see how this material will be useful for all kinds of objects.

Maya Tutorials - Mental Ray Part 5: Portal Lights

This was quite a nice and easy tutorial to set up and it had good results, the render times however weren't enjoyable.

Maya Tutorials - Mental Ray Part 4: Physical Sun & Sky

This was a nice little tutorial, I thought it was cool that the light direction dictated what time of day it was.

Maya Tutorials - Mental Ray Part 2 - Final Gather

This tutorial was really cool, it was nice to see the light bouncing and making the scene feel alive. The tron touch was also great.

Maya Tutorials - Mental Ray Part 1

This was nice to get a better understanding of how to adjust the render settings and what actually needs adjusting. I did have some issues with the ray tracing shadows, they wouldnt update with the high samples they remained grainy (below I attached the render).

 Ray tracing shadows

Mental ray shadows