This book is the definitive guide to Mental Ray that also explains how to translate science into art, lighting theory, camera theory and cinematography. The book further contains fantastic snippets not only on how to manually achieve great results, but how to automate these settings and create powerful scripts. This book explains sophisticated, yet simple scripts that automate the tasks that users of 3D Studio max, V-Ray and Mental Ray have found tedious. Using real world calculus and theories of lighting, this book develops scenes that automatically calculate the ideal camera settings in order to obtain the best possible render from a scene.   Key Features Intelligent accompanying 3DS Max scenes with real world placeable cameras, lights and utlities which will enable you to master your own lighting techniques as well as the fundamentals. Book focuses on achieving professional results as well as developing your understanding of autmating tasks, so that you can truly focus on the art. Maxscripts available and explained that facilitate some of the tedious parts of rendering your scenes; depth of field, focusing the cameras and more all can be exectuted with scripts based on real world values. This book will tach you how to set up a virtual machine (VM) to act as your renderer, so that it can free your machine up to work on other scenes. This book covers lighting and camera techniques used by professional pohotgraphers, cinematographers and fine artists Each scene has been constructed to correlate with the book in order to understand the artistry and