So there are enough guides and movies out for Mental ray Caustics and GI, FG and HDRI but not much on the building of shaders and the use of all those fun nodes in the Hypershader. So here goes. This is Maya specific but might be of use to other programs, I dont use em so I duno.

First to install "most" mental ray shaders. They are made of 2 files usually with the same name ending with .mi and .dll extention.
These go in ..program files/alias/maya6.0/mentalray/ the .dll goes into the "lib" folder and the .mi goes into "include"
The .dll being a link or translation for the .mi into Maya.
Then open the "maya.rayrc" file and you need to add a location for the shader you just pasted.
So in the "link" set add (link "{MAYABASE}/lib/Zimburger.{DSO}")
and in the "mi" set add (mi "{MAYABASE}/include/Zimburgler.mi")

Replacing "Zimburgler" with the name of the files you pasted into the folders above. Make sure you add these lines bellow the Mayabase line.
Then save and when you load mental ray into Maya in the plugin manager it will load all the correctly installed plugins. If a shader is more complicated than this is will have it's own documentation, like the SSS-Skin shader has you install icons and scripts as well.

Now I'll touch on some of the basics that I've found.

You can apply both Mental Ray and Maya Software at the same time to an object. If you are just using only Mental Ray shaders your object will appear as if it is untextured in the hardware render (green shaded) or with the default Lambert. And depending on which renderer your using it will use the Maya nodes or the MR nodes.

The Image shows a network for a sphere to render in both Maya and Mental ray render engines.
The maya Blinn shader has the 3 checker nodes plugged into Color, transparency, and reflection.
The Mental Ray shader has a checker plugged into the diffuse of the mib_illum_blinn.
Then the blinn is plugged into the mib_transparency (out value-input). The second checker node is plugged into the "transp" of this node.
Then the transparency is plugged into the mib_reflect (out value-input). The third checker node is plugged into the "reflect" of this node.

For the render I changed the diffuse/color to a Red color from the checker so we can see what's going on. And as I'm still learning too I dont know what's up with the shadows if anyone has any ideas. *hint* And finally make sure you turn up the raytrace a bit for the mental ray render or the faces visible through the front of the ball will appear black.

So while Everything is contained in one Node for the most part in Maya Software in Mental Ray each component needs it's own node and they are then piggybacked together and plugged into the mental ray material shader of the objects shading engine.

Next Friday I'll add the bump network information that I've found. But if anyone else wants to add info about other nodes I'd love for this to turn into a all inclusive guide. And it would be great if we could keep questions and comments focused so we dont have to search 20 pages to find the info we need thanks.

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