Note – the free license is good for a single stand-alone installation only, and does not include render-farm capabilities. The mental ray rendering plug in is available as a free download from NVIDIA and can be obtained here.

Good news – you can still use it in 3ds Max 2018! However, if you want to use the Lighting Analysis Assistant for 3ds Max, which is still included, you need to be using the mental ray engine. In fact, I’m finding the quality of the images, especially interior scenes, to be superior in many ways to what I could achieve with mental ray or ART. So I’ve spent the last few months getting up to speed on the Arnold engine, specifically for use in Revit to Max rendering workflows, and I’ve become much more comfortable with it than I was when 3ds Max 2018 was initially released.

I’m the sort of person who tries to adapt to new technology whenever I can, and I don’t usually have much trouble leaving the past in the past. 3ds Max 2018 includes the Arnold 5.0 rendering engine, along with the Advanced Ray Trace (ART) renderer, and no longer includes the legacy mental ray renderer that so many people have been using for the last several years.

Mental ray for 3ds max 2018 download