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But also it can be extremely expensive to calculate for every frame of your animation.

So create simple terrain, and some object on it. I created high tech tower, but you can make whatever you want, just add some small details, because I?m going to show you how to make them more obvious.

Currently, one of the best ways of achieving photo-realistic imagery is to render using Mental Ray for Maya. Mental Ray offers a Global Illumination and Final Gather solution, which when combined, simulates the physics of real world lighting effects. Now, for the first time in 3d, lighting techniques used by photographers and filmmakers can be applied to computer graphics. The following is a guide for setting up Global Illumination and Final Gather using Mental Ray for Maya. It is based on notes from the web, Maya's Help manual and good-old fashion experimentation.

*update: You also can watch the video here

Once you have created several approximation methods you can easily reuse them for each surface to fix the tessellation. Here is the actual tutorial part. It's real simple, and I don't use displacement in this exercise. This issue probably comes up a lot if you us mental ray to render with trim surfaces. You can download the scene at the bottom of the page if you want to follow along.