Tutorial : "Vector Rendering in Mental Ray"
by Ashish Rastogi, India

Sword
Ok, you want your rendering in vector format, no problem you can do in 3dsmax 6 or above. Open your model in 3dsmax 6 or above, I choose this sword model.

Then Press F10 to open render menu and in Assign Renderer select Mental Ray Renderer.

Assign Renderer

Go to mental ray's Rendering > Render > Renderer menu, and under Camera Effects, enable the Contours switch


Then, in the Camera Effects rollout, click on the Shader button in the Contour Output slot and choose Contour PS as the new shader.



Click-drag this slot into an unused sample slot in your Material Editor, and make it an instance. In the Material Editor, just type in your final render path for the vector output, with the Adobe Illustrator .EPS format as the suffix (for example, C:\sword.eps).


In another slot of Material Editor select Mental Ray and in Advanced Shaders Rollout select Contour then "Layer Thinner(contour)". In this adjust your line width and color settings.


Apply this material to your object. Click on Render, and you'll produce an .EPS vector file that you can open in Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Flash without problems. But you might not see rendered results in your 3ds max Rendered Frame window and sometimes can get an error window saying "This format can't open in 3dsmax". Ignore this message and check the path you mention above. You will get an output like this (below).

As you know suggestions and comments are always welcome at my email address ashras99@rediffmail.com

Bye.


 
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