Scene Construction

The purpose of the mental ray rendering software is the generation of images from scene descriptions. A scene description is a high-level 3D “blueprint” of elements such as geometric objects, lights, and a camera that looks at the scene. Scenes can be created by writing an appropriate text file using a text editor, but in general scenes will be too complex for that and are created by modeling, animation, and CAD tools instead. However, This book uses simple scenes that can be typed in with a text editor, or taken from the sample scenes provided with the mental ray distribution.