Merry Christmas!

It's been a good 2011, and thanks to all the readers and comments posted here! Merry Christmas to all of you guys! Hoping to add more posts in the new year.

The above image was rendered using iray. The tree was downloaded from evermotion.com

Is That a Photograph? Architectural Photography for 3D Rendering

My virtual course goes live today!  Best of all it's free for you to see.  You have to register for an AU account, but it's worth it, because there are many classes worth viewing.  You can also download all the handouts for the courses as well.





The course description:

It is not enough to know how to create great 3D renderings. You have to make images that really sell, and to do that you need the knowledge of a photographer. This class covers worthy architectural photography principals and explains how to apply them to 3D renderings. You will learn how to translate good image composition, lighting, and staging to your renderings. This class will also discuss photographic phenomenon such as vignetting, barrel distortion, glare, and other issues and describe how to fine-tune these photographic flaws to your advantage to create a rendering that really sells.

Studio Lighting Setup

Showcasing your next best product in a white studio lighting environment seems very simple.  In actuality, doing this correctly or "physically accurate" is really more complex than you'd think.

If you tried to render the above image the way you thought you should do it, you would probably would have set your background environment to white, then place all of your objects on a white plane, then hit render.  But this is what you get:

It's not exactly what you wanted.  So to fix this, the answer lies in a production material called the Matte/Shadow/Reflection shader.  This is a material that does some nice trickery and saves you alot of work to render your scene with a different "environment."  This can be found under the mental ray materials in the Material Map Browser.  Simply apply this material to your ground plane.  Of course you'll have to change the "Camera Mapped Background" color to white if that's what you want.

The scene setup is very simple for this example.  I have 2 photometric area lights, and a plane that my teapots are sitting ontop of.  That's it.  Simply apply the Matte/Shadow/Reflection material to your plane and you're done...you have now created a white studio light setup.  You may also notice that the objects in the studio rendering, are lighter than they are in the regular rendering.  This material renders your objects to bounce light as if the scene were white, so your objects are also reflecting the white scene, hence physically accurate lighting.

The MSR material can also be used to create mattes to render certain objects that need to reflect an environment, and can be composited later in post.





There is one thing to note:  I've found this material to act really weird if Exposure is turned on. So before you start setting your lights, bear in mind you'll want to set up your scene without exposure.

This is what happens if you use the MSR material with mr Photographic Exposure Control...weird!

Maxwell Strikes Back

So way back when, we all thought Maxwell was going to be the answer and the end all be all for renderings. The visuals were promising, but the workflow was painful, and always felt like it broke my production process. They had a plugin for SketchUp and for 3dsmax. Both versions required Maxwell's own 3rd party software rendering program, and so it wasn't really rendering within the software of choise. Vray for SU never really worked right either. Adjusting materials were cumbersome, but it just didn't like some large scenes built in SU. So I continued to stick with my tried and true workflow: model and texture in SU, import into 3dsmax, add lights, tweak materials and render.



Well perhaps Maxwell has learned from its past, because they just released a brand new plugin for SU. It's so streamlined into the software, infact there isn't even an install. Just a maxwell.rb file with a folder that gets placed in the plugin folders and that's it. If that wasn't good enough, they provide it for free, which allows you to render up to 800px. Now if you want to render larger images, the licensed version is nothing to kill your wallet at $95!

The icons are very simple aside from the buttons that give you scene stats, take you to Maxwell's website for documentation, and the help button, there are very few options.  The Fire button simply opens the render frame buffer window up.  When you hit the fire button, it bakes everything from your scene so that it can render.  This sounds painful, but it really isn't.  For large SU files the longest it took was a mind blowing 30 seconds.  At that point the frame buffer window becomes a realtime render window much like VR-Realtime.  The pencil icon in the middle opens your settings window.  The eyedropper icon selects your materials.  The disc looking icon and the f.d. ruler select your DOF, and make choosing it very easy.

The settings that really sold this to me were the materials.  They are so simple, and they are almost a seamless 1:1 with what you have already created in SU.  So if you tweak a material in SU it gets tweaked in Maxwells material browser.  So Maxwell just has the same materials that you already created, with some extra settings.  You can change the materials reflection type to tell it to render as metal, lacquer, velvet, light emitting, satin, etc.  But what is really clever is that MW automatically creates a grey-scale bump map for your texture map....do I hear a "sweet".  It gives you options to invert.  What is even cooler is if you change the brightness or color on the map in the MW settings, it changes them in your SU material settings too.  Of course if you really want to get fancy, you can unlink the MW texture from SU, but it's just a toggle and you can always turn it back on at any time!

The camera settings are what you would think they are.  There are parameters to specifiy the render size.  Then there are the camera settings themselves.  Much like mental ray in 3dsmax, you can specify your fstop, shutter and ISO, or just your EV value.  The cool thing here is that changing your fstop affects your amount of DOF just like a real camera. Also you can choose if you want the focus to work manually, or semi-automatic, or totally automatic, based on the scene objects and distances.

The next settings are the environment or lighting settings.  The first option is to choose your type of skylight.  You can use the default sky dome, the physical sky  (which is linked to your sun angle from SU), or a simple hdr map of your choice.  Then you have the option to turn the sun on or off along with other atmosphere settings like turbidity, ozone, etc.

Then, much like vray, you can toggle a ground plane on and off as well.

The last settings I'm going to cover are some custom settings.  You can tell MW to use just front or both front and back faced materials.  Also how it will respect hidden layers.  There is also a material override option for simple testing.  Then there is a section for color management. you can tell it to use sRGB, or the myriad of color options.  The burn tells MW what to do with highlights, and then there is gamma.

The last section, simulens, I haven't played with yet, but have a hunch that it's really cool.  I'm guessing devignetting is simply vignetting in your rendering.  There are options to add aperture maps, which i'm guessing control the way DOF creates its bokeh effect.  But these are all photo-phenomenon tools that will add realism to the rendering.

That's pretty much it.  I was really amazed at how simple and robust the UI was.  I'm not sure if its because my computer is any faster but I could guess that the rendering algorithm is faster at computing the data.  It seemed that my renders were going quite quick, and gives iray a run for its money.  Where some of my scenes wouldn't fit into memory for iray in 3dsmax, maxwell in SU was able to handle them fine.  I have a feeling it has to do with SU's small memory footprint, then again, there may be some wizardry coming from the Spaniards!

20min - Still some speckling as I had a huge copper cylinder casting caustics, but not bad

white house

This one is from a series of renderings. Everything is 100% 3D. The building was modeled in SketchUp as usual. Everything else was modeled in 3ds Max.  To get this one to crank out, I had to use mr Proxies.

wire-frame

Folks have asked me to post settings for this rendering.  So here you go:

Believe it or not, the indirect illumination settings were simply just FG on the default draft setting.  The sunlight was from a daylight system, and sampling was 1,16 on box filtering.

The true magic for this render comes from the leaf material in the trees.  It's simply an A&D material using the translucency map.

The leaves are single planes, so I did set the material to Thin in the Advanced settings.

For the glass it's simply another A&D material with a gradient bitmap plugged into the the bump slot.  The ID on the bump map was set to 3 to correspond to uvw modifiers that were applied to objects that had the glass material.  I set the uvw modifier to "Face" so that the map would fill the entire face of the geometry.  Of course for the diffuse color its black. Other than that, there is not much special to the glass.

Win a trip to AU 2011

I will be at AU2011 this year, and hope you can make it too.  I'm teaching a virtual class that you will want to check out: Is That A Photograph?: Architectural Photography for 3D rendering.  This year the virtual classes are free for anyone with an AU account, which is also free!  At AU itself, I will also be facilitating an unconference session along with the talented Jorge Tiscareño: Best Practices for Design Visualization Management


Also 3Dconnexion is offering a trip to Autodesk University in Las Vegas on Nov. 29 – Dec. 1, as well as a airfare, accommodations and a SpacePilot PRO 3D mouse!


Enter to win. Submissions will only be accepted by midnight U.S. PDT on November 7, 2011.  The winner will be contacted by email or phone on November 8, 2011 and will have 3 days to claim prize.

Good luck and see you at AU!

Strange happenings here...

You may notice that this website is not called "3dsmaxrendering.blogspot.com".  It is now just my website: ramyhanna.com, but I still plan on posting my 3dsmax tips and tricks here.  I'm trying to consolidate my two websites into 1.

Don't worry, if you have a hyperlink to the old site, I won't leave you hanging, it will get forwarded to the new url.  So please bear with me as this site is undergoing a few changes.

Thanks and stay tuned!

r

Blow Trees Blow!

This is a post I've been wanting to do in a while, and am just now getting to it. I've tried all sorts of things with trees: rpcs, proxies, billboards, high poly trees. None of them really made me happy until I got them moving in the wind. There are several ways to do this, but here I will show you one way that I think works that is simple but gives fairly good results.

For this example, I just opened up one of my trees from my library of foliage. Select it, go to the modifier tab, and select vertex mode.

Now scroll down, open the soft selection roll out, and turn it on where it says "Use Soft Selection".  For this example I set my Falloff to 8'.  This will vary depending on the size of your tree.  Now when you click on one vertex, you will notice the colors around your vertex.  This is creating a soft selection from your selected vertex out 8' in all directions.

Now select various vertices on the outside edges of your tree until it looks like the image on the left.  Be sure to rotate your tree around to select all sides.  Be sure that the soft selection stays in the leaves and branches and doesn't creep into the trunk.

Now for the unconventional part:  With your vertices still selected and still in vertex mode, add a Noise modifier.  Under "Strength" for this example I set it to 8" in x,y, and z.  Also, check "Animate Noise", to change the noise over time.  You will notice that in your time-slider below there are keyframes at the begining and your first and last frame.

I think this step is unconventional because it is only applying the noise modifier to the selected vertices.  I often use this practice, where I will apply another modifier while the lower stack is open in face or vertex mode.  I'm not sure if Max was designed to do this...but it works.  That's it!  Now your tree is animated to blow in the wind very naturally.

You may notice that this can be very computationally heavy for your scene.  There are a couple of workarounds:

-Un-select your tree when navigating.  Having your tree selected when tumbling/orbiting around can be brutal.  Especially when you have the modifier tab selected!

-Set the view of your trees in your viewport as a bounding box.

-Proxies in this example won't work.  MR proxies will not respect the modifier applied at the vertex level.  So you can use x-ref objects instead.

-Lastly, you can render your tree out as an image sequence, and use the footage as a texture map onto a plane for your scenes.  I used this technique in the example above.