Customize menu > Preferences > mental ray panel
Enable mental ray Extensions—When on, enables certain features that provide additional support for the mental ray renderer. When off, these features do not appear in the interface. Default=on.
These are the features enabled as mental ray extensions to Autodesk VIZ:
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mental ray Connection rollout for materials (Material Editor)
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mental ray Light Shader rollout (Modify panel for lights)
Warning: If you have assigned shaders and adjusted their settings using the mental ray Connection rollout, turning off Enable mental ray Extensions will lose all these assignments and settings. The same applies to light shader assignments.
Show Brackets on Current Buckets—Displays white selection brackets at the corners of the bucket currently being rendered. Default=on.
Show Visual Final Gather Progress—When on, the rendered frame window displays a coarse image of the final gather points as those points are being calculated. This provides visual feedback of
the final gather solution in progress. Default=on.
If you prefer that the final render directly overwrite the previous one in the rendered frame window for comparison purposes, turn this off.
Clear Frame Window Before Rendering—When on, before rendering the rendered frame window turns to a gray shade by clearing every other scanline. This makes it easier to see the progress of rendering. On the other hand, it can make it more difficult to see the effect of small changes to the model or the view. Default=on.
Open Message Window on Error—Whenever the mental ray renderer detects an error, it generates an error message. When this option is on, the Messages Window is displayed and the error message appears in it. Default=on.
Show/Log Information Messages—When on, displays informational messages in the Messages Window. Default=off.
Show/Log Progress Messages—When on, displays progress messages in the Messages Window. Default=off.
Log Debug Messages (to file)—When on, writes debug messages to the log file, if one has been specified. Default=off.
Debug messages are never displayed in the Messages Window. The mental ray renderer generates a large number of them, which would make the window hard to read.
Write Messages to File—When on, generates a mental ray log file. Default=off.
The other log file options are unavailable unless you turn on Write Messages To File:
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Append to File—When on, appends messages to the existing file. When off (or if the named file is not found), only new messages are written to the file. Default=off.
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File—Click to display a file dialog that lets you choose the name and location of the .log file.
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File name field—When you have specified a log file, this field shows its name and its path.