Today, I did some Mental-Ray tests:

Believe it or not, ever since I started using 3D Studio Max (5 years ago – 3d studio max 4.1 awesome!), I started using it with Scanline and later with Vray plugin. Mental-ray seemed always very complicated to me, and I didn’t bother using it, because I had all the speed and power of Vray. So today, I was kind of bored and decided to look at other rendering plugins, like fryrender, maxwell, but then I remembered about mental-ray, and how it is already built-in to 3d studio. So I googled some mental-ray examples, and saw a lot of new renderings that look really cool and realistic, and I read some articles about new improvements to the renderer, sun system, and their new proxy support. Proxy is one of the main reasons I was hooked on vray, because you can render billions of polygons with little effort. Also, other software, like Maya and I think Cinema4D use mental-ray, so I decided to learn some mental today.

I tried to use mental-ray for the first time, and was stunned by its simplicity compared to vray! I was able to render decent rendering from first try, but the materials set-up was a bit confusing, because there is so many different types in the material editor, so I just ended up using Standard material. The rendering time wasn’t that bad at all, it took about 5 minutes to render 700×400 (I guess, there is a way to render faster, I just need to get used to all the settings).