1. What is mental ray, for what we use it and why, I think to it is something about UV mapping, but honestly I have no idea.
2. What is different beetwin Mesh and Poly Objects. I see that Poly usually takes lesser polygons but is this all?
3. What does it means "Real World Size", and how to make my model real world sized? So does this means if I make human archer who would be in real world tall 180 cm does it means his top of the hea should be 180 and foot on zero Z, or it is in inches?
4. How to do metalic shine materials/uv mapping, it doesnt metter of texture quality.
1. Mental Ray is a renderer, renderer is an engine used to render still images which can be rendered in a sequence to make a pre-rendered movie.
It is the software used to make those photo-realistic pics you see on the net.
Every renderer has its own properties, such as lighting and illumination in one renderer may be achieved using lights unique to that renderer, same goes for materials which may not work at all in a different renderer.
There are other renderers which are much faster and can render with higher realism but those are usually just as expensive as other softwares.
Max also has a scanline renderer which is very basic and is unable to render very realistic images.
Other softwares use different built-in renderers, such as Mantra in Houdini.
2. Mesh and Poly are pretty much just different ways of drawing polygons in 3d. It is only really relevant to max though because most real-time applications convert polygons into triangles anyway. (because hardware acceleration in modern gpus works on tris not polygons)
Polygonal modeling is more cleaner though and it has much more powerful modeling and selection tools in max it also results in much better topology which is absolutely necessary for high poly modeling (using subdivisions).
However you will still have to convert the mesh into mesh, be careful converting FROM mesh into poly though.
Poly still draws triangles but poorly, so it may destroy some.
Let's say you have a circle with a vertex in the middle, mesh will display it properly but when you convert it into poly it may destroy the middle vertex and connect the sides because it just can't draw the triangles in the middle.
3. Real world size is actually referencing UVW mapping. It is for lazy architectural designers and the like.
It simply takes the measurable dimensions of the texture and when you apply them to an object it gets mapped with correct scale.
Then there is "real world size" that you can make for whatever reason, by making max use the metric system and measure the size of your object.
That is used when you require entirely accurate 3D blueprints. (for example when you design an interior, you need to take it's dimensions into 3d and dimensions of all the objects for an accurate 3d rendition)
4. That is done using materials, those are often related to the renderer and will only show on a render.
To see most of those materials in max you have to set your default renderer into Mental ray. (go to render setup and on the bottom choose any of the mental ray presets in the rollout)
Then when you go into material editor click where the "standard" button is and you should see extra material types.
The ones with bright yellow dot are mental ray only materials (which will usually only render in mental ray and nowhere else) they have most material types there.
Arch & Design material is about the most standard one which can fake most real life surfaces.
. Thx.
