This course will be collaborative and open enabling the Instructor to meet students’ individual requirements and work paces. Students will be free to revisit topics discussed in previous tutorials, learn from each others' work and share critique.

Initial assignments will incorporate sample exercise scenes simple enough to start up from scratch. Once the basic concepts are mastered, students will be encouraged to embellish their work with more sophisticated models, environments, and textures.

Week One - Introduction, Structure and Color
In the first part of Week One, we will introduce the mental ray framework. We will look at how it is integrated into a 3D application, and discuss the basic structural concepts for scenes and shaders.

We will also examine pictures of the world around us, to build an understanding of the best approach for transforming what we see into a created look. This will help us become familiar with the common metaphors of the 3D CG industry, and the terminology used with mental ray rendering.

In the second part, we will begin to take an in-depth look at each type of shader commencing with the basic surface properties and material shaders which only produce color. We will also look at all of the different ways to make color without the use of lights.

Students will be required to find references for analysis before using the custom color shaders. In an assignment delivered at week's end, students will be required to submit a scene that uses each shader in a composition which can be either visually instructive, or creatively meaningful.

Week Two - Light
Once we understand the effect of light on what we see, we can begin to break it down into its elements. In Week Two we will examine light. We will look at how it is represented and brought into a 3D application, and the variety of ways it is used to affect the color of a surface. We will categorize how light travels from a source through a series of material interactions to the eye. In this way, we will begin to understand how to deconstruct and reconstruct a given look. We will relate this to the various rendering techniques offered by mental ray and investigate how various shaders use these techniques.

Week Three - Shape and Space
Week Three will begin with discussion on how shape adds detail to our lit scene objects. We will talk about the controls for modifying shape from the perspective of the renderer. Initial discussion will concentrate on displacement which directly modifies geometry and move on to bump and normal modification at the surface which tricks the eye into seeing shape detail.

In the second part, we will show how the space in between, outside or inside of objects may affect what we see and show the variety of ways to produce these effects.

Week Four - Image
In Week Four, we will think more about the final image, how we get from color at a point in the 3D scene to the pixels in the image. We will talk about samples, antialiasing and filters. We will start thinking more about the final 2D representation, the camera representation, image components, and the image processing which can be performed by the renderer. We will also discuss the various ways to split the rendering into layers.

Week Five - Implementation and Optimization
In Week Five, we will explore the various controls over rendering techniques, and analyze the different phases of the render, in order to lay the foundation for how to optimize its performance. We will also discuss how an OS, application, hardware configuration and memory affect performance, and how to use the controls from an application to match configuration and the demands of a particular scene.

Week Six - Finalgathering and Ambient Occlusion
With recent rendering advances finalgathering is used increasingly as a standalone tool to provide the effect of global illumination in a scene.

In Week Six, we will delve deeper into finalgathering as a global illumination technique. Barton will demonstrate the basis of how it fits into the rendering process and show how it gives the artist an intuitive and physical feel for its controls. In addition, we will talk about ambient occlusion, how it compares to finalgathering, and how to approach a scene to determine which technique may be the best fit.

Week Seven - Motion and the rasterizer
In Week Seven we will further explore the rasterizer, a completely different rendering algorithm, and look at its capacity to provide faster ways to render scenes with lots of transparency and motion. We will also dig into the various ways to optimize motion blur with straight forward ray tracing.

Finally, we will investigate the combination of raytracing and the rasterizer and look at the process of using the tools in a single pass and a two pass technique.

Students need to be familiar with web navigation and browsing, as well as email.

Students need to be familiar with using a bulletin board system (such as CGTalk.com).

Examples of work
Students are required to submit a minimum of three samples of their best work showcasing their ability to render in 3D. Students will be required to upload their sample work in the week preceding the commencement of the course.

Software and Hardware Requirements
Maya, XSI or 3ds max. Barton will be giving out sample scenes from Maya and 3dsmax, but most example scenes should be easily created from scratch across all platforms.

Note: Some minor issues of workflow and feature availability may not be transferable to all 3d applications.

A Broadband Internet connection is recommended.

Hardware capable of running a 3D application with a medium size scene should be sufficient (1Gb Ram), however, we encourage participants who want to render large scenes with memory up to the OS process limit (2Gb Ram).