Leaf Tests With mental ray
Trees. ugh.
Anyway, I’m trying to find a nice setting for the mia_material_x mats for foliage/leaves in mental ray. It’s quite difficult to find settings that look good through various lighting conditions.
 Sunny day |
 Under a pale grey sky |
This is looking OK, but there are three key ingredients to get really nice looking leaves.
- Decent diffuse texture
- Appropriate amount of reflection/gloss
(obviously heavily depends on which species you are trying to create) - Decent translucency texture
For mental ray specifically:
- Translucency value must to be always at 1
- Transparency colour must be set to pure white (1.0, 1.0, 1.0)
Image sourced from http://sor.typepad.com/
Once you have this basic it’s just a matter of tweaking the gloss and reflectivity settings until you have a nice look for your scene.
Unfortunately I have not found a “universal-looks-sweet-on-every-scene” setting yet…
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Comments
working on that üniversal setup! coming soon.
like your renders could you post your mia settings?
Awesome! Thanks Roy, your settings have been a huge help in getting nice looking foliage renders.
The test renders had these settings:
Diffuse weight: .883
Roughness: .4
Glosiness: .65
IOR: 1.52
With the mib_twosided node. Then your settings for pretty much everything else. Look forward to seeing what you come up with!
wow!! very nice