Interior rendering in Maya and Mentalray

                         In this tutorial you can learn some simple interior lighting techniques which is very useful for scenes without any physical lights. These are not advanced methods but can use in many ways.

                       Before you begin load the mental ray plugin. Place a area light near the window. Scale it until it is fit to your window. Go to attributes editor and turn on Use Ray Trace Shadows. Set Shadow Rays to 30 and Ray Depth Limit to 2.

                                   In mental ray section expand the Area Light and Caustic and Global Illumination. Turn on Use Light Shape and Emit Photones. Then enter the following values. My Photon Intensity value is 2000 but yours may be different. That depends on your scene.

                                 Then place a spot light outside the window. Set above values to ray trace and photon section. Set Light Radius to smaller value like 0.08. Don't turn on the Area Light in Area Light section.

                                 After placing the light your render will look like this.

                                Now you have to setup the render. Go to Render Settings window and set render type to Mental Ray.  Switch to Quality tab and choose Production for Quality Presets. Set the following values.

                                  You can use above values or choose Production:Fine Trace for Quality Presets. Choose Mitchell for multi-pixel filter to better result. Turn on Global Illumination and Final Gathering. Modify the Global Illumination section if you like to add more details. Set Accuracy to 1024 in Final Gathering section.
                    This is my final render.