ABSTRACT
The controls you will use in mental ray will fall under two areas of indirect lighting: Final Gather and Global Illumination. As you work with values in indirect GI you will clearly see the trade-off between rendering speed and quality. One of the skills which will be demonstrated in this chapter is how to make your work as efficient as possible, creating and adjusting your lighting with a minimum amount of time expended. You will start with the interior living room scene with all of the materials applied and work on the lights. It should be noted, that even though the implied workflow is to work first on materials then lights, as is suggested by the chapter order in this book, it is entirely possible and efficient to work on lights first and then on the materials. In fact, it is hard to imagine a project where you would not have to go back and forth working on lights and materials.
