Master Zap with a post on Mental Ray version 3.9 which contains support for unified sampling, and with Autodesk’s new 2012 product released of Maya, 3DS Max, and Softimage you can expose this hidden feature which is a new way to choose which and how many samples or rays are shot into a given pixel, and what position in space as well as the TIME those rays have which is particularly important when talking about motion blur. Check out the post on Mental Ray unified sampling in Autodesk 2012 products here.

“The new 2012 versions of the Autodesk products Max/Maya/Softimage are upon us, and they are loaded up with mental ray 3.9. One of the cool new features in 3.9, which doesn’t seem to be exposed in some of the products, is “unified sampling”.”