If you want to learn MR from these tutorials, be prepare to bring 10 cups of Starbucks. Carl will put you to sleep with his over explanation. A great example: INSTEAD of : "Picking up from the previous lesson, we see here that there is an issue with the reflection of the blinn (points to the related area) not being seen through the glass material. This is because in Maya 8.5 the Mental Ray and Maya shaders are still not one hundred percent compatible. The simple solution here, in this case, is to replace the blinn material on the table leg with a mental ray chrome material." He made me sit through: And as I mention at the end of the lesson, we do see ah one of the issues that um is the perfect illustration of this. And we can see that we have ah some reflections that's at the bottom of this table's leg and it looks fairly reflective and it looks somewhat chrome like but once you reach an area of that leg that is seen through the glass material. The reflections no longer appear. Now appears as if something more like ah just a plain lambert material. Now the reason that this happens is the dialectric material that we are using is a special mental ray material. Now these legs are using standard maya material. Now, as of right now, as of maya 8.5. the mental ray shaders and the maya shaders are still not one hundred percent compatible and a perfect illustration of that pause is seen right here where the mental ray dialectric material is not able to compute the reflections off of this maya shader and so it doesn't let any of those rays pass back through pause this dialectric material. So looking for us though the solution is relatively simple, all we have to do is to take the legs and replace their maya material with a simple pause mental ray material. (MR interior technique - creating chrome table legs) Just because someone can use the software doesn't mean they are good instructors. Can we get a good instructor? All they have to do is get it right once. read more