Maya 2016 introduced quite a few new changes to the 3D content creation tool. One area that might be a shock to users is the mental ray quality settings tab.
Understanding is important to prevent artists from quick fixes that turn out to take longer than originally planned.
Unified Sampling.
Once upon a time, if you were using mental ray, you really had to wrangle samples all over the place to adjust the quality and speed of rendering. Then came the unified sampler, which allowed you to control both quality adjustments and speed with one simple slider under the mental ray quality tab.
Unified and Segmented Sampling.
With the release of Maya 2016, the new mental ray core, and its new integration features in Maya, and mental ray quality adjustments has again undergone some changes. This time bringing segmented sliders for sampling.
There is still a general slider that governs the overall sampling in the scene. Now there are also new sliders that will let you adjust the lighting quality, environment lighting quality, the indirect diffuse quality, and the material quality in the scene.
Getting With the Program.
The Inside Mental Ray blog has been breaking down some of the new additions, features and workflow that has been added to mental ray in Maya 2016. You should probably check out the first post Understanding the New Mental Ray Render Settings in Maya 2016, if you haven’t already.
The second installment covers Quality Adjustments in Maya 2016. The article covers adjusting overall quality, and balancing quality adjustments across the new sliders with plenty of comparison renders. Check out the post for Quality Adjustments in Maya 2016 here.