Chapter 4 mental ray ® and materials 4.1 Introduction You can use most of the standard material types available in 3ds Max when rendering with mental ray ® , and you can find a listing of unsupported materials in the Help files for 3ds Max. Specific mental ray materials are identified in the Material/Map Browser by a blue sphere, whereas the mental ray maps are identified by a yellow sphere. mental ray materials can be rendered only with the mental ray renderer. A little historical background might be helpful in understanding mental ray materials. Earlier in the development of mental ray, you could use the mental ray material or a subsurface scattering (SSS) materials type. These mate- rials had many numeric value adjustments that were difficult to use and were not at all intuitive. You had to know a lot about the mathematics behind the development of these materials before any of the adjustments