Category: mental ray > Materials
Shader Family: Surface Material
The path_material shader implements path raytracing. In contrast to distributed raytracing, one ray at the most is reflected or refracted for each ray hit when path raytracing is used. With sufficiently large trace depth limits, most of the indirect illumination effects are computed correctly. However, the results are very noisy and an extremely high number of samples is required for obtaining high quality images.
Note that the final gathering and global illumination settings have no effect on the surfaces with this shader: the diffuse indirect illumination component is computed by reflecting at most one ray according to a Lambertian-distributed direction. There is no path_material_photon shader. For faster rendering, final gathering and photon emission should be disabled. Higher trace depth setting than is used in scenes with photons may be required.
The parameters are identical to those of the dgs_material shader.
