Joep van der Steen and Ted Boardman have just sent a re-write of Joep's previous mental ray book, Rendering with mental ray & 3ds Max to the Focal Press for publication.
The book has all completely new chapters that are designed to ease you into the concepts of making mental ray productive. Setting up a mental ray scene requires a structured approach to set a base global illumination solution on which you can build more complexity efficiently.
This book will help you start off on the right foot and then leads you to more advanced topics and exercises that you can adapt to your specific needs.
Joep's background is civil engineering and mine is in the architectural field so many of the exercises are based on those topics, but the lessons are much more universal to help you understand how mental ray functions inside 3ds Max 2010.
Look for the book on the shelves later this summer.
Good luck and have fun.
