First try on mental ray

After 2 years of VRay experience, I decided to learn mental ray, the GI renderer that comes with 3DS Max.

After reading the tutorials and trial renderings, I was able to grasp some fundamental concept of mental ray. It's important to understand how Final Gather and Global Illumination work in mental ray in order to get the realistic results. The Arch & Design shader which is designed for mental ray is user friendly. The preset parameters are good enough to generate realistic results.

After several attempt, I came up with this visual which was rendered with mental ray. Not bad tough but I would say that VRay offers a more straight forward solution once the basic concept is understood.

The following visual was done with VRay. It has more realism compared with with the previous one. I believe with more practice, I will create better results with mental ray.