r a m y h a n n a . c o m

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-23T10:46:00.001-06:00

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

2011-11-29T09:16:00.001-06:00

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

2011-11-17T12:04:00.001-06:00

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

2011-11-11T16:39:00.001-06:00

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

2011-10-30T23:03:00.000-05:00

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

2011-10-25T21:56:00.000-05:00

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...

2011-09-23T00:35:00.001-05:00

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!

2011-09-20T23:06:00.006-05:00

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.

iPhone - Maxed Out!

2011-08-26T22:09:00.000-05:00

I have to show off my new iPhone cover. Much thanks to Jamie Gwilliam at Autodesk for this awesome 3dsmax 20th Anniversary iPhone cover!

Jamie is an expert with 3dsmax, and knows alot of its nuances and quirks. He has got a great 3dsmax site with alot of really quick and simple tricks that are really useful, and worth checking out at:
jamiesjewels.typepad.com/

Control A&D Materials Globally!

2011-07-15T21:40:00.005-05:00

Ok,
I often get tired of having to render AO (ambient occlusion) passes along with rendering my animations. I've often wanted to just use the AO setting in the A&D materials, but I'm way too lazy to go through all of my materials in my scene to turn them on, so I wrote this simple maxscript that does several things for the A&D material:

-turns on AO in all A&D materials of a scene
-sets the AO spread distance to 3'
-turns off backface culling for all materials in scene

Here it is:

for a in objects do
(
if (classof a.material == Arch___Design__mi) then
(
a.material.opts_ao_on = true
a.material.opts_ao_distance = 36
a.material.opts_backface_cull = false
)

if (classof a.material == Multimaterial) then
(
for b = 1 to a.material.numsubs do
(

if (classof a.material.materialList[b] == Arch___Design__mi) then
(
a.material.materialList[b].opts_ao_on = true
a.material.materialList[b].opts_ao_distance = 36
a.material.materialList[b].opts_backface_cull = false
)
)
)
)

I can't take the credit for this script. A big thanks to max expert Louis Marcoux. This script can also apply to any other parameter in the A&D material. If you want to change other parameters of the A&D material, you can find them here. And substitute /add them into the script.

Shake Shake Shake...

2011-06-30T13:32:00.004-05:00

It's been a while since I've posted something....or at least it feels that way. A friend and I decided to hike Guadalupe Peak (the tallest point in TX) several weeks ago, so now I'm trying to get back into my routine. Here are photos from our trip.

If you're tired of your camera movement animations looking to cg-ish, this tip could help you. If you want to go for that hand-held camera feel, there is a very easy way to apply this effect to your already animated cameras. I've found using this trick in some of my camera shots brings an extra dimension of reality to my animations. It's a very subtle effect, but can make the difference. This is achieved using the Noise Float Controller.

Straight camera animation:

Hand-held camera animation:

When you create your camera in 3dsmax it comes with default controllers assigned to it. To see those controllers go to the Motion Tab (1.) in your control panel, and open the Assign Controller (2.) rollout. The controller that we are going to select is in the Roll Angle (3.). The default controller for the Roll Angle is set to "Bezier Float". You will want to change the controller from Bezier Float to Noise Float. To do that select the Assign Controller button (4.).

You will see a list of different controller types. The one we're interested in for this effect is the Noise Float controller. When you select it and hit "OK", a new dialog will pop up. These are the settings for the Noise Controller. You will find that playing with these settings will adjust the way your camera rolls as it moves during animations...this is what gives it the hand-held shake effect.

After playing with the Noise settings, here are the settings used for this examples animation. Every animation will be different based on speed, camera movement, timing; so you will just have to play with the settings through trial and error until you get your desired result. If you'd like to open the Noise Controller window again after you've already closed it, simply double click the Roll Angle.

If you want to remove the Noise Controller, select the Roll Angle and hit the Assign Controller button (4.), then just go back to the Bezier Float controller.

Happy Shaking!

Modeling In SketchUp

2011-05-13T11:48:00.001-05:00

I know this is a 3dsmax blog, but I can't help but share the awesomeness of SketchUp. I do most of my architectural modeling in SU, and it's because I find it is very fast for creating buildings to scale, and accurately. This is a building in Galveston, TX that we are doing some renovation work on. The video is a time-lapse of my modeling process. The entire process took me roughly 5 1/2 hours to model.

Enjoy.

The Two-Sided Map is gone?!....not really

2011-04-20T22:45:00.004-05:00

Between getting renderings out, visiting construction sites, and fixing computers other than mine, (how is it that the 3D guy always ends up being the I.T. guy too?) I just never got around to addressing this one. Well, it's been bugging me that this has been an issue for over a year now and I never addressed it... so here we go:

If you've been using 3dsmax 2011 or 2012, you may have noticed that the Two-Sided Map that is super useful for creating translucency in things like grass and leaves is missing! Well not really. Autodesk has just chosen to "hide" the map, even though it is installed. This is typically done if a map is "unsupported" or does not contain documentation.

So you may be asking now "how do I get it back?" Here's how:

Go to your 3dsmax root folder\mentalimages\shaders_standard\mentalray\include\

The file to tweak is "base_max.mi"

Open the file with notepad or your favorite text editor. In 3dsmax 2011 go to line 408, in 3dsmax 2012 go to line 448 ( you can turn on the show line number in Notepad if you turn off Word Wrap under Format, then turn on the Status Bar under View)

Change the text on that line from "hidden" to #"hidden"

The # will simply ignore the hidden command and make the map visible the next time you start up 3dsmax. This also applies to other maps such as the mia_lens_bokeh map which is also cool.

3dsmax 2012 Announced!

2011-03-11T12:30:00.000-06:00

Yes it's already been a year since 2011 was announced, and now it's time for 3dsmax 2012. I had the privilege of putting my 2 cents into this product as one of Autodesk's beta testers, and I was also quoted in Autodesk's "What's New" brochure for 3dsmax 2012. There are some awesome features that will be integrated into the software out of the box. I could tell you here, but go check them out on Ken's blog. Well done to the Autodesk and mental images teams for outdoing themselves again with a great package!

Render today, motion blur tomorrow

2011-02-10T21:32:00.002-06:00

It's been a while since my last post. Between 3D projects, holidays, and life getting in the way, this has been sitting in the corner waiting. No worries, I'm not going anywhere. So let's get to it.

Animations with motion blur (MB) look so much better than without them. Sometimes just adding the MB can be the difference in making an animation go from good to great. But rendering with MB turned on can become very expensive and slow on your renders. So here is yet one more pass to add to your arsenal of compositing passes: the Velocity Pass. The velocity pass will allow you to fake MB in compositing. I'm sure the velocity pass can be used in photoshop, but it is really geared for using in packages such as After Effects and Composite (which comes with 3dsmax for free now).

Without Blur

With Blur using velocity map (exaggerated for effect)

So here is how to create the Velocity map: Just go to your render settings window, select the Render Elements tab, and click "Add." Choose the element "Velocity". That's pretty much it. Under the Velocity Element Parameters be sure to tweak your Maximum Velocity, otherwise you may never see any results. Often I will check "Update", render, then un-check "Update". Having update turned on will change the Maximum Velocity based on your scene at render time. So if you have an object moving crazy fast, it will know what to set that value to. For this posts example, I found that a setting of 150 worked well for my spinning torus-knot. Also be sure that Filtering is not checked. Much like the Z-pass, the stepping on the pixels must not be aliased or you will get strange results. So now when you render your image sequence, a velocity map sequence will render as well.

velocity pass

So you know how to make a velocity pass.now how to use it. for this example, I will show you how to do this in After Effects, but it can be achieved with other compositing programs. Drop your beauty pass (regular render) sequence and your velocity pass sequence into the timeline. Be sure your beauty pass is the top layer so that you can see it in the preview window. I like to use the CC Vector Blur effect.so with your main layer selected right click and choose Effect->Blur & Sharpen-> CC Vector Blur. In the Effects Window you can now see all the settings for the CC Vector Blur effect. Under "Vector Map" choose your vector layer. You can now see the blurring effect on your render. You can adjust the Type, Amount, Angle, Smoothness, and Softness to control the look of your motion blur.

With lengthy animations with a lot of motion, this method will by far be faster than blurring straight into your render. I'm always a proponent of post work, because you can adjust your settings and see the results in real time without having to re-render.

"i" is for spline

2010-12-09T23:08:00.002-06:00

Here's a quick simple, but useful tip. Forever I was wanting to pan as I was creating my splines in max, but every attempt to pan would stop the spline creation. I began to think it can't be done. I would ask "how do you pan while creating a spline?" Well it can be done. The answer is "i" on your keyboard. As you create your spline, if you hit "i" Max will just re-center your view to your cursor location.

Happy splining!

3D Process / Post Process: tricks revealed!

2010-11-04T17:18:00.003-05:00

Many of you have asked for my post production process…so here it is. I typically use AE (Adobe After Effects) for my post work, but for this post I’m demonstrating in PS (Photoshop) because most people use PS over AE for stills. However the principles apply to all software. Also, I’m trying to keep it “out-of-the-box”, rather than show a lot of plug-ins. I always suggest learning the techniques with the software, then after understanding how to create them, go get the plug-ins to make your job faster-not better.

Some of you already know, but I do most of my modeling in SU (SketchUp). Not because it’s better than Max, but I find it super fast for building design process. Because we do architecture, SU is very good with boxes and simple shapes. If you want to get into character modeling, Max or Mudbox is better for that.

I also start materials and texturing in SU. I find SU super easy and fast for texture layout. If I texture most things correctly in SU, I can almost avoid the UVW layout process in Max entirely. The materials in SU are nothing special, just place holders really for the maps I want to use in 3ds Max.

Using Max 2011 has been great, because I can import SU files straight from Max without needing to export models from SU. This new importer in max is incredibly powerful. It respects instanced components from SU, remembers UV texture position from SU, and converts SU materials to A&D materials automatically….amazing tool.

During import I opt not to import the SU cameras. I prefer navigating in 3ds Max to get my actual camera angles. This is where I add any entourage from my library of 3ds Max models. Furniture, cars, plants, trees, etc. all get added here. Then I begin texturing. I swap out SU textures for better texture maps. Or sometimes I replace a texture map with max procedural maps like tiles and gradients.

Some of the general settings for my A&D materials: If I can keep glossy samples to 8 then I do. Under Special Effects, I usually turn on Ambient Occlusion, and set the distance to 3’. Under Advanced Rendering Options, I make sure that backface culling is un-checked so I can render both sides of a mesh. If I have a single plane of glass then I check Thin walls. If my glass is a box or has thickness, then I leave it as solid/thick. I find the real magic behind getting realistic renders lay in the material reflections. I usually have a reflection map that drives how much reflection takes place. In this tile material, the grout lines are black meaning no reflection, and the tile is more white meaning a lot of reflection. I use the same map for a bump effect. I almost always have my glossy reflections lower than 1.0. For this example I have it set to 0.4 – meaning the reflection is scattered at 60%, in this case with 8 samples.

Next I go to lighting. In this scene I have 1 Daylight System, 309 photometric lights, and 5 mr sky portals, for a total of 315 lights in my scene. This many lights in a scene would typically be brutal. However, for my photometric lights, I opted to use Point for my Shadow type. It doesn’t look as good as the other options (Line, Rectangle, Disc, Sphere), but renders much faster than the others at their default setting. For every shadow that Point renders, the other options render 32 samples per shadow. So this is a big render saver. For my photometric lights, I usually use the default light levels, and switch to photometric web using an IES file for the distribution. As for the mr sky portals, I try to limit their use to just where the large windows are. Render times take a big hit from mr sky portal shadows as well.

This image is what the render straight out of max looks like, known sometimes as the beauty pass. I render inside models with GI & FG. Surprising to me, I rendered this scene with the default settings for both GI & FG. I was reasonably happy with the results. I did get noise near some of the clerestory windows, but I was willing to live with it. I left all of my lights on, then calculated GI, saved it to a file, then rendered FG from each camera adding onto the previous FG map. Before rendering the final renders, I had 1 GI map and 1 FG map for the entire scene. This made it easier for me to switch cameras and not have to worry about changing light maps. The GI map ended up being 154 MB. The FG map was rendered at 50% from the final renders at 800 x 400 pixels, and ended up being 34 MB for all 11 camera angles.

This is the Ambient Occlusion Pass. If you want to know how to do this, check this post out.

This is a flare pass for the lights. This can be created in 3ds max, or in post. I usually create this image in PS, it’s faster and gives me greater control on what the flares look like.

This image is a dummy people pass. I rendered this one out to give me correct scale for adding people in PS later. This way my people won’t look like giants or elves when I scale them.

These are the people that replace the dummy people. To each person I add motion blur, reflections, shadows etc. Then I save this as a .png file and add it to my beauty pass.

This is a volume pass that I render in 3ds max. It is created using the Parti Volume Shader. I then add it in PS and tweak it to the right look.

Lastly, I render a Z depth pass. Depending on the rendering I sometimes use this. If there really isn’t an object in the foreground then often I don’t use this at all, and rather just manually blur the edges of my image.

With all of these passes combined in PS, AE or other compositing photo/video editing software, you can take your original image and turn it into something much stronger visually. This quick video should give you an idea of how I add all of these elements together using color correcting, layers, levels, to transform a raw rendering into a finished rendering.

If you would like to see all of my renderings from the KHS project, click here.

virtual face lift

2010-09-08T23:48:00.002-05:00

Ok. I finally gave this site a much needed face-lift to keep up with the ever changing blogger google technology, and to make easier to read. Not to worry though, everything is still here as you've seen it before...it just looks more awesome-er.

On another note, here is an animation I created for the 2009 USAA Conference keynote lecture. Thought I would share:

How do you Save Scene Materials to a .mat file in Max 2011?

2010-09-07T09:46:00.001-05:00

If you have a scene with hundreds of materials and want to save them to a file, this can seem like quite a task. This has been an area of grief for a lot of Max users who are use to the old Material/Map Browser (MMB), and have upgraded to Max 2011. There are nice features like the Slate Material Editor. Even with all of its cool new tools, there isn’t a simple one step method for saving all of your scene materials to file. But before you go selecting all of your materials and one-by-one adding them to a library, there is a simpler method. I have to tip my hat off to Jennifer O’Connor for showing me this workaround, but I thought I would post the process since it is not in the Max documentation anywhere….or if it is, please show me where!

Your intuition wants to collect all of the materials from your file and find a way to export it. The solution is actually the opposite, and is found in opening your existing max file as a library… “huh never thought of doing that!”

In the MMB select the top left eject icon, and choose Open Material Library.

Switch the file extension from .mat to .max. Now locate your max file (that you already have open), highlight it and hit open.

Now your scene files are all copied to a temporary library with the name of your max file. Now to save that library to a .mat file. Right-click on the library rollout bar. Choose the path name, then Save As…

Now you can save those materials into a .mat file. So when you open a new Max file, you can always open this .mat file as a material library that has all of your original scene materials

Re-importing SketchUp models into current Max scenes

2010-08-21T15:30:00.001-05:00

I just had someone ask me a question based on this issue, and I thought I would post my solution. If you are modeling in SketchUp, then import your model into Max, create materials, lights, pretty renders, etc, you're usually in good shape...until the lead designer says "Lets rework the design." You're then thinking !@#$%. I have to redo all of my materials.

This video explains my process for re-working a model in SU, and re-importing it into Max, but using the materials that I have already created for the original model. It may not be the most elegant process, but it works and saves me alot of time.

A couple of side notes:

-If I import as .3ds file, I scrap the texture maps from SU, and apply a UVW modifier with realworld coordinates to all of my meshes....this way I always remember how to reapply my UV's on a new import and the old materials will still work.

-If my sketchUp files have texture maps and are imported as a .skp I use the existing UV coordinates from SU

High School Animation

2010-08-06T21:33:00.006-05:00

I finally completed this animation project, and thought I would share. Hope you like it!

It probably took 2 months to complete from start to finish. It was modeled entirely in SketchUp. Then imported to 3ds Max 2010 for texturing and lighting. It was rendered with mental ray. I used After Effects for the post work and shot editing. It's a composition of 11 different cameras. For most shots I rendered 5 different passes and combined them together in post. People have been asking about my "After Effects" work. I basically use the same process that Alex Roman uses in his Third & the Seventh project.

These are some other renderings and shots from the SketchUp model:

Efficient Interior Lighting with mental ray

2010-07-01T16:33:00.007-05:00

Many folks have asked me to do an in-depth interior lighting tutorial. The question you’re probably really asking is "how do you light an interior scene that renders quickly?" To achieve this, it is more art than science. To get quick render results you have to take shortcuts and cheat a little to get those fast results. I’ll show you how I set up lighting for my interior scenes. I’m assuming that the scene has already been textured. Just a warning, my technique is not physically accurate by any means, but it renders quite fast and is a useful method for a fast production turnaround. Disclaimer: This is not a tutorial for someone who is just learning Max (there are plenty of those out there), so I’m assuming that you know your way around the software.

Here is an outline of how I setup my lighting in my scenes, and I broke it up into 8 steps:

1. Create Daylight System (allow mr Photographic Exposure, and mr Physical Sky)
2. Set exposure Preset to Physically Based Lighting, Indoor Daylight
3. Turn OFF Final Gather (FG)
4. Turn ON Global Illumination (GI)
5. Tweak and save .pmap file, switch to Read Photons Only from Existing Map Files
6. Turn ON FG, create interior lights (photometric lights)
7. Save .fgm, switch to Read FG Points Only from Existing Map Files
8. Turn ON mr Sky Portals (optional), and Render image

1. Create Daylight System

This one is fairly straight forward. The settings that are most important for my sun are the ones that affect orientation. Because every scene is different, orienting your sun to get the most light into your windows is key, and will help keep your render times down. Even though simple, the North Direction / Time of the day and year are perhaps the most important factors in creating a well lit render.

2. Set exposure Preset to Physically Based Lighting, Indoor Daylight

Setting my exposure to the preset default of interior daylight gives me a good benchmark to know what to tweak my lighting against. If you don’t have your exposure set up correctly, you could be cranking the lights up till the cows come home. Having the proper exposure ensures that your light settings are within somewhat physically accurate ranges.

3.Turn OFF Final Gather

This is done due to the technique in using the combination of FG with GI. GI is calculated first, then FG uses the light from GI to create a more efficient FG map. Think of GI as the primer, and FG as the paint color that goes on-top of the primer.

4.Turn ON Global Illumination

This is really the first step in tweaking the lighting. Once you turn on GI, this is what I get with the default settings:

The default setting is actually pretty good, and works for most scenarios. However you will notice that you can see the photon disks on the geometry. Typically you can leave it at the default setting because it usually gives the optimum lighting amount. But I’ll explain how you can tweak GI to get rid of the disks if they really bother you. But if you’re not interested in this portion, you can skip straight to step 6. The disk visibility can be corrected by adjusting the Maximum Sampling Radius. In mental ray if this setting is turned off, GI, by default, creates photon disks that are 1/100 of the scene size. This is typically usable for most scenes, however sometimes the disks are too large or small for the rendering.

5.Tweak and save .pmap file

So the first thing I change for GI is the Maximum Sampling Radius. I turn it on, and start with a small radius and work my way up. As I increase the radius, I also increase the Average GI Photons per Light, just slightly. The goal is to achieve a bright-even face on the geometry without getting changes in color on the same surface. Any artifacts that are noticeable from GI will affect the way FG is calculated, so it’s important that the GI map is smooth.

Maximum Sampling Radius: 1’
Average GI Photons per Light: 20000

So out comes the photon disco ball you may have seen in other renderings. What you are really seeing are 20000 photon disks at 1’ in radius. There are really two approaches to getting a good GI solution from this point. You can keep the radius at 1’, and increase the Average GI Photons per Light to crazy high numbers. This could give you a smooth result with nice detailed soft shadows, but can take a very long time to calculate. Rather, I prefer to increase the radius size until they overlap large enough to get a smooth result. Then I turn up the Average GI Photons per Light, but not so high to make my GI calculation times go through the roof. There is no one solution. Play with the combination of settings of the radius size and photons per light count until you get something that looks reasonable.

Maximum Sampling Radius: 5’
Average GI Photons per Light: 20000

Maximum Sampling Radius: 10’
Average GI Photons per Light: 20000

Maximum Sampling Radius: 30’
Average GI Photons per Light: 20000

Maximum Sampling Radius: 30’
Average GI Photons per Light: 40000

Maximum Sampling Radius: 30’
Average GI Photons per Light: 60000

Maximum Sampling Radius: 30’
Average GI Photons per Light: 80000

Maximum Sampling Radius: 4’
Average GI Photons per Light: 2000000

For this scene I chose to set the Maximum Sampling Radius: 30’ & Average GI Photons per Light: 40000 was the best solution for what I was trying to achieve. This number of photons was just enough to smooth out the disks, but setting it any higher would just darken the image more. Interestingly enough, it seems to be very similar to the default GI settings. I also rendered one with Maximum Sampling Radius: 4’ & Average GI Photons per Light: 2000000. You’re probably wondering “if the settings are so high, why is it darker?”. The lower setting images are brighter because they are taking a sample of a color and spreading it out 30’ in every direction. So if a sample is taken just on the outside of the wall where the sun light is very bright, it will spread that color 30’ out and perhaps inside the building. This is why the early results are in no way accurate, but give us the results we need.

Once you’re happy with your GI map set it to Read Photons Only from Existing Map Files, and click Generate Photon Map File Now, to save it to a file.

6.Turn ON FG, create interior lights

Now that you’ve saved your GI map, we’re ready to create the FG map. But before calculating the FG map, I create all of the lights that will be present on the inside of the building. So all the fixtures, wall sconces, can lights, etc….I create photometric lights for all of them. I try to keep most of my lights at their default values so they may render accurately. For the photometric lights depending on the Shape/Area Shadow settings, you can have some really long render times. Try to keep the Emit light from (Shape) to Point, and use the other shapes (Rectangle, Disc, etc) sparingly as they increase render times drastically.

As far as FG settings, I usually set the FG Precision Presets to Draft believe it or not. I leave most everything else at their default value. Often I change the Noise Filtering from Standard to None. This allows mental ray to use all of the FG bounces rather than dropping some of them to smooth it out.

A little about filtering your FG map: If you calculate FG with no filtering, when you render there is no need for mr sky portals. If you calculate FG with standard filtering, then when you render you will want to use mr Sky portals. Both of these methods will give you the same lighting results. The first technique (no filtering) gives you faster lower quality results. The second technique (standard filtering) will give you slower, better results.

7. Save .fgm, switch to Read FG Points Only from Existing Map Files

When you’re happy with your FG map, under the Reuse rollout, switch Final Gather Map to Read FG Points Only from Existing Map Files, then hit the Generate FG map button. This will save it to a file, much like the GI map. Another trick I do is to render the FG map at 50% of the actual render. So if my render is going to be 1600 x 800 pixels, I generate a FG map at 800 x 400 px.

8. Turn on mr Sky Portal (optional), and render image

Now that you have your FG map saved to a file, we can create our render. Now you can turn on the mr Sky Portals if you rendered with a FG map that has standard filtering. In this scene I have 2; 1 on the left store-front, and 1 in the back. These sky portals help focus the FG map where we want it to go. If you can afford to have them on, then do, but to get a fast rendering out you may want to forgo having these lights on, and use no filtering when calculating your FG map. At this point you can go back to your exposure settings and tweak them if the image is too bright or too dark.

This is my typical process for getting interior renders from a scene. I usually go one step further and render an ambient occlusion pass, and add it to the rendering in Photoshop. There I play with levels, color corrections, and other things to beautify the image. There are so many other ways to do this with the same tools that you can tweak along the way to get your rendering right. Rendering is a give and take process as well. The more bells and whistles you add, the longer it will take to crank out, so it’s about finding that happy medium of time vs. quality. But in the end it’s all about an image that you’re happy with.

3ds Max 2011 out of the box imports .skp files

2010-06-13T13:02:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to say something about this, but keep assuming that everyone knows this. 3DS Max 2011 imports SketchUp (SU) files without needing any plug-ins or Connection Extension add ons. This is most strategic for Autodesk, and I'm sure that Google is all flustered over this one.

So why is this so special? Well, typically if you wanted to get your model from SU to 3ds Max, you would then have to have a SU Pro license to export your 3d model into either a .3ds or .obj file from SU. But now that Max imports the .skp file straight up, this means that Max users can forgo the license for their SU software and use the free version. Perhaps this will force Google to start charging for even the free version of SU. But in the meantime, Autodesk has the match point. So it will be interesting to see what happens in the future!

Creating a Dirt Pass

2010-04-06T10:41:00.008-05:00

I probably should have titled this "Adding the Grunge to your Ambient Occlusion Pass", because that's really what it is. You now know how to create an ambient occlusion pass, so this is really just one more step.

I first start with a regular A&D shader and apply it to my scene. In the diffuse node I applied an image that I created that looks like dirt, grunge, and scuffs. You can scale the map by playing either with the scale in the map itself or by creating a UVW modifier to the scene. I prefer the UVW modifier. The reason I do this step first, is just to get the scale of the map looking right in my scene.

Then I create a mental ray material, and in the surface slot I add a mix map. In the Mix Amount slot is where I add a Ambient/Reflective Occlusion map (I like to set my Max distance to 3' usually). Now that the AO map is in the Mix Amount slot, Color #1 and Color #2 are being rendered but controlled by the AO map...so you can now put anything in either of the color slots.

Because I wanted to render a grunge/dirt pass, I copied and paste/instanced my map that I created into the Color #1 slot of my Mix map. Now you can apply the shader to your scene and render.

This shader will only render the image in the areas that are occluded or in close corner areas of geometry, and give the effect of dirt and scratches that are in these tight spots, much like real life.

The power of Render Selected

2010-03-31T14:47:00.012-05:00

This is a feature that was newly introduced with Max 2009 and is worth mentioning. Along with the render region, crop, and blowup options is a render selected button. Unlike the other options, this option is only located in the render frame buffer window:

-The Rendered Frame window in the top left corner (as long as you don’t have it collapsed with the Toggle UI button).

This option is a quick easy way to create a rendering of just certain objects while still being able to receive reflections lights and shadows from the scene. It’s useful for rendering dynamic animations of people moving, or that rug with tons of displacement. Unlike, Selected, with the box on, mental ray only renders what is selected.

Before you render, be sure to hit the Clear frame buffer button (the X icon on the top left), so you don’t have anything else in your frame.

Then select the objects in your scene that you want to be rendered, switch the Area to Render mode to Selected, and hit render.

This is a great way to create masks or passes and blend them in your favorite compositing program. A couple of things to note: If you want the light information to be seamless with your beauty pass, be sure to save your FG and GI maps first.