Note: mental images and mental ray are registered trademarks of mental images GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin, Germany.
3ds Max ships with an integrated version of the mental ray renderer from mental images. The mental ray renderer can generate physically correct simulations of lighting effects, including ray-traced reflections and refractions, caustics, and global illumination.
A 3ds Max material plug-in may be used as a wrapper around a mental ray shader to share its parameters (using the mental ray translation API), thus providing a custom user interface for the mental ray shader from within 3ds Max. 3ds Max also provides an API for accessing mental ray shaders and shader declarations from plug-ins
The mental ray interface gives the developer more control over how 3ds Max plug-ins and user interface interact with mental ray (e.g. undo/redo, custom UI controls).
Note: This SDK documentation does not cover writing mental ray shaders themselves, only the integration of such shaders into 3ds Max plugins. For information regarding the creation of mental ray shaders, see the "mental ray Shader Reference" section in the mental ray Reference included with 3ds Max.
In order to learn about the mental ray renderer and mental ray shaders we suggest reading the following documents provided with 3ds Max:
For more in-depth information about mental ray we suggest consulting the books "mental ray Handbooks", volumes 1-3, published by Springer-Wien, New York.
