You add contour rendering by assigning one of the contour shaders to the Contour component of a material. (This component is found on the mental ray Connection rollout and on the mental ray material's Advanced Shaders rollout). Then when you render, use the Camera Effects rollout to enable contours.
On the Camera Effects rollout, additional shaders can modify the contours, or control how they are rendered. For example, if you assign a Contour Only shader to the Contour Output component, the rendering consists of just the contours, and not the shaded model.
Note: Contour shading does not work with distributed bucket rendering.
To add contours to a mental ray rendering:
-
Choose Customize > Preferences. Go to the mental ray panel, and turn on Enable Mental Ray Extensions.
-
On the Render toolbar, click Render Scene.
If the active renderer is not already the mental ray renderer, go to the Common panel, and on the Assign Renderer rollout, click the “...” button for the Production renderer. A Choose Renderer dialog is displayed. Highlight “mental ray Renderer” in the list, and then click OK.
-
Open the Material Editor. For the materials of objects you want to render with contours, use the mental ray Connection rollout to assign a shader to the Contour component.
Another technique would be to use the mental ray material, and assign shaders to both the Surface and Contour components.
Tip: The Simple contour shader renders uniform lines whose color and width you can control. The other contour shaders provide variant contour styles with more direct user controls.
-
On the Render Scene dialog, go to the Renderer panel. On the Camera Effects rollout, turn on Enable in the Contours group.
To simply add contour lines to a rendering, leave the shaders in the Camera Effects rollout set to their defaults. For other options, see Camera Effects Rollout (mental ray Renderer).