This tutorial will get you up to speed in setting up a simple Final Gather scene.

Set-up

These are some tips on using Mental Ray.

- make sure your models are UV mapped before you render. Even if it's just a quick automatic mapping, this can prevent some errors.

- keep your geometry quad or tri.

- avoid using ambiance lights; especially with Final Gather.

Setting Up The Render Settings

Step one - Open up the render settings.



Step two - Under the tab Common, find the tag render options. Uncheck Enable Default Lighting. If you miss this step, the entire rendering will look like junk.

Step three - Set the render using to Mental Ray.

Step four - Click over to the Mental Ray tab and, under secondary effects, check Final Gather.


Now let's explain some attributes. Roll down to the Final Gather tag in the Mental Ray tab to see the Final Gather attributes.

Accuracy - If you set this low, like 20, your model will look like it is blurry and will also have spots. When rendering a scene, don't go lower than 100.

Point density - This is the density of Final Gather points it'll render. The more points you have, the closer packed they'll be, providing a cleaner light.

Point interpolation - Be careful with this attribute. Most of the time, leaving it at default setting will work just fine. The more you increase this value, the more smoothed out the rendering will get. But you will lose some detail.

Scale - Basically this allows you to adjust just how much light Final Gather adds to a scene. If you're using Final Gather with an HDRI (not covered in this tutorial), you'll definitely have to make this value darker because there would be to much light in the scene.

Rebuild - When this is set to on, Maya generates new Final Gather points every time you render. When this is off, Maya will refer back to it's last Final Gather points file. When it's set to freeze it prevents new date to be written to the previously made Final Gather file.

Enable Map Visualizer - When checked, you can see the current Final Gather points in your Maya view port.

Preview Final Gather tiles- - When checked, this allows you to see the Final Gather render When you're in the render view. This is checked by default.

Now, back to our scene. On the view port menu, go to view>select camera.

Now open the attributes editor and roll down until you find the tag environment. Set this to white.


Now render.


Here's a basic scene created using Final Gather;

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