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

RTC VisDay 2012

2012-05-19T23:31:00.000-05:00

Next week I'll be in Australia speaking at the inaugural VisDay prelude to RTC 2012. I will be presenting my process behind CSHS and how I used mental ray to do it. I will also be giving a lab during RTC, with a step-by-step process to produce similar results.

See you there!

Simple lighting that always works!

2012-05-08T14:55:00.000-05:00

I've had many people ask me how do I create lighting that works for every scene. If you're using indirect illumination or light bouncing, the answer is: there is no lighting that works for every scene. I will show you a technique that doesn't use indirect illumination, by creating a simple lighting setup that will always work, and renders really fast. So this setup is really a cheat. But it can really work to get a project out if your production time is crazy short.

Rendering with this technique

This is a trick that I learned from a friend several years ago, and I'm finally coming around to posting about it. This is also a trick that adds the Ambient/Reflective Occlusion map to your rendering (I also have alot of people ask me how to add AO to a render). Basically the idea is that you plug the AO map into an omni light, and the occlusion gets added to all of the geometry in the scene.

This trick is done using 1 omni light, and it is the only time that you should ever use an omni light if you're rendering with mental ray. If you forgot where it is, you'll have to switch from Photometric back to Standard.

The main catch to making this work is that the omni light must be placed at 0,0,0. If the light is anywhere else in the scene, the occlusion won't line up with the geometry in the scene, and you'll get really psychedelic results!

These are the settings for the omni light. Under Advanced Effects be sure to check Ambient Only. This will disable the shadow options. Also check Projector Map, and insert an Ambient/Reflective Occlusion map here (it's found under Maps->mental ray). To access its settings you can click and drag an instance of the map into a material editor slot.

I usually leave most of the settings at default. But I almost always increase the Max distance to something like 4' all the way to sometimes 10'.

To see the results of this in your renderings be sure to turn off any exposure control settings. You can also turn off any Indirect Illumination in the render settings.

That's it! What I really like about this setup, especially for complex animations, is that there is no light calculating process, and the renders from frame to frame are very stable and consistent. The soft shadow effect (ao) also adds virtually no extra render time to your finished rendering.

If you have a tight production turnaround, and are concerned about the lighting in a scene not being designed yet, this is a great solution.

Two more renderings with this technique:

jellyfish - iray style

2012-02-12T22:58:00.000-06:00

I may have not posted too much on iray for as much as I'm really liking it. So here is another iray post. Ok, for many applications, iray has become my second favorite rendering engine next to mental ray. For many reasons it can really be much better. If the scene fits into your GPU memory, then it is almost always faster than mental ray or vray. DOF is free, meaning it doesn't slow down the rendering eninge. There aren't any irradiance maps, photon maps, final gather maps, or light cache maps to calculate or read from. Which can take a lot of hassle out of the design -> production process.

iray | 1200px X 600px | 10 min.

So about a year ago my son and I were watching Finding Nemo, and during the jellyfish sequence, I thought, I would love to try to tackle those fish with my own rendering. I also wanted to get something similar using iray. So here is a little breakdown of my homage to Pixar.

So I started off with a single jellyfish itself. It's no more than a sphere for the head, and a series of planes and splines for the tentacles. The image on the left is the texture that I created for the head. I found a texture of a basketball for the bumps, then recolored it in photoshop to give it that purply-stripy look.

For the broad tentacles I wanted something that looked leafy, so I thought I could use a lettuce texture as reference. I looked for something that had a vein quality to the leaf.

So I took this leaf texture into Photoshop, copied it several times to create a tentacle arm, colored it using Hue/Saturation with the Colorize option checked until I found a pinkish-purple hue that matched the jellyfish head. I then played with the brightness/contrast to make the veins really pop.

So I could have spent alot of time modeling this tentacle, but instead I just projected this texture onto a plane. So I also created a cutout-alpha channel map to control the opacity of the plane.

So to really make the tentacles look more natural, I added a twist modifier to give it the appearance that it was thin and fluid. Then I added a shell modifier to give it some thickness. Then finally I added a bend modifier to give it the impression that they were being pulled by the head of the jellyfish.

I gave the jellyfish multiple tentacles, and added some strands simply by using some splines. Then to complete the jellyfish, I grouped it and added a bend modifier to the whole fish to really give it the impression that it's moving and swimming in water.

Here is a view from the camera showing what the rendering will look like. I intended to use DOF, so my field of view was very shallow with a focal length of maybe 80-100mm. I also added some particulate to simulate particles in the water. They were simply low poly spheres that were placed at varying distances to give the illusion of depth. They don't look like much in the viewport, but with DOF make a big difference in the overall environment.

For the caustics, I actually faked it with a neat trick. I created a plane that sat on top of the jellyfish. I applied an A&D material to the plane that had a caustics texture map to control the cutout opacity. I used a program called Caustics Generator, that creates fake caustic texture maps. It can also create image sequences of moving caustics, which is great for animations.

I then created two spotlights above the plane so that light would only be cast through the caustics openings simulating a caustics look. I also created a light from behind the camera to give it a photographers flash look. So it felt that the lighting was coming from the camera itself.

One, more thing. I did try this scene out with mental ray, and it was crazy slow compared to iray, especially with DOF turned on, running over an hour long. Even though I love mr, this was an example where iray was much better. Much like a mechanic has different tools to fix a car, so should 3D artists be familiar with all of their tools to get the job done correctly. Mental ray, Vray, Maxwell, and Iray are all great render options, but there is usually a best option depending on the situation, so don't ge too attached to a rendering engine...technology is changing too fast for that!

SpaceMouse Pro

2012-01-31T22:46:00.000-06:00

I have to admit that during the holiday break, I couldn't stay away from 3D software. I also found that as I would navigate through 3D space, my left hand would naturally reach for my Space Navigator that wasn't even there. That's when I realized that I really did use this thing. So now I'm convinced that the Space Navigator is a must have.

Well 3Dconnexion late last year released their newest product, the SpaceMouse Pro. It's a hybrid between the SpacePilot Pro and the SpaceExplorer. After giving it a test drive for several weeks, I have to admit it really is their best product yet. Not only is it sleek looking, but it has just the right buttons that need to be used and no more than that.

Probably the most distinguishing buttons that the SpaceMouse Pro has are the large buttons on top. I found these to be really useful for setting up tools that I use often in SketchUp & 3ds Max. The great thing about assigning your regular tools to these buttons, is once they're assigned, you can remove them from your menu bars and free up even more space in your viewport.

I'm using SketchUp as my example, but this applies to any software. In SU, I assigned 1,2,3,4 to my visual styles toolbar. These are styles that I switch between alot during modeling, and now that they're assigned to these buttons, I can simply remove the tools from my palette. What's even better is they're positioned right where I need them as I'm navigating so I don't have to take my hand off the navigator itself.

Another toolbar in SU that I constantly use are Views buttons to jump to my top, front, right, left, etc. Now instead of needing the toolbar on, or even keyboard shortcuts, this mouse has these buttons built right in. I guess the designers knew that 3D artists use these views alot for editing models and figured to add them in. Of course if you want to customize these buttons, the software with the driver allows you to change the buttons to any function you want.

Along with the views button is the addition of some other frequent buttons used to navigate in 3D, such as shift, ctrl, alt, and esc. It might be genius, because adding these buttons next to the navigator can almost mean never letting go of the navigator in SU when inference snapping a line to lock to an axis even during a pan!

Lastly, the SpaceMouse Pro has a Fit button, that zooms into objects visible in your scene. Which is very handy, and allows you to do this, again, without leaving the Navigator.

Really all of these buttons could be used on the keyboard as shortcuts, but the beauty about having them around the orbiter is that you don't have to lift your left hand as often to leave your navigation just to do simple functions such as shift and esc. I would recommend this tool for anyone who is a serious 3d artist.

A word of caution though...once you start using it, just be sure to take it everywhere with you or you'll find yourself reaching for something that's not there!

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

UPDATE (2012-02-02): So just recently downloaded the latest Maxwell for SU, and they did make some revisions in their software. Unfortunately the software now requires an .exe install, and is a little larger, but hopefully that will only make it faster. Also it now requires Microsoft Silverlight, but that's not so 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: