3ds Max 2018 Mental Ray GPU Rendering

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I'm a university student so my knowledge of 3ds max and rendering engines is pretty basic.

I've a course where our techer want us to render our 3d model with 3ds max 2018.4 with mental ray.

The problem is that the cpu based render is cooking my laptop and i with 95° temperature i've already changed my thermal paste.

Is there a way to implement my gpu for the rendering? i dont want to leave my laptop for like 15hrs with 100% cpu usage for a single render.

Also i know that mental ray is stricly cpu based so maybe there's something esle i can do to have the exact same option of mental ray in arnold or something else GPU based?

my pc spec's

Asus ROG Strix Scar GL503VM

i7-7770HQ

Nvidia GTX 1060 

16GB RAM

Windows 10 Home 64 bit

(sorry for my bad english)

[madsd]

Teachers and students automaticly gets access to the newest version of 3dsmax.
Why your teacher is running you on a version of max that is many years old is a question that might need investigation, since it indicates your teacher could use some instruction on how to teach with the current public version.

You can download the newest version of max 2021 and use Arnold GPU instead, do note you have to redo lightning and materials.

[Anonymous]

@madsd i know in fact i used the 2021 version for modelling but the teacher of the rendering module (which is different) only uses mental ray 2018 so i was wondering if it was possible to find the the same mental ray render feature in arnold.

[madsd]

You need to be specific in order to get a proper answer.
What are you attempting to do, under which circumstances.

MR used Photonmapping, this is a method that gained traction about 15 years ago, so not exactly the front end of rendering things, it is very dated.


We need to know more in order to guide you correctly.
But as a rule of thumb, we can help and we can do what you are doing with MR except if Photonmapping for things like caustics are an integral part of the project.

[Anonymous]

@madsd i've attached the parameters that our teacher told us to use. for the light we use phothometric lights directly from the manifacturers web site. the material are from mental ray library but i think its easy to re-do in arnold. 

[madsd · Accepted solution]

Sounds like you already have the neeed motivation to do this.
As for the settings, just ignore those MR settings and get started with Arnold instead.

Post images and questions in this thread, when you want to do something, but cannot figure out how to do it by yourself.

We can probably get you going, as long as you are concrete and identify your problems and explain them.
For Arnold, just use the same light for starters, you may need to add some skylight, we have no clue what you are rendering and what things looks like.