Volumetric Shadows Maya and Mental Ray

Edit: This tutorial was from 2009 and things may have changed since then..

This is a tutorial on volumetric shadows using Mental Ray For Maya. I decided to do this as my first tutorial because I spent many hours trying to figure out how to do this using Mental Ray. It wasn’t very intuitive for me. If you have ever had trouble with graniness, blotchiness, or just plain ugly shadows, take a look at this and see if you can learn anything.