P.S. I don't have any 3D experience except with Sketchup (which is notoriously easy to use)... should I not waste my time? Perhaps there is a renderer out there with a good tutorial... I'm willing to spend 16 hours or so on getting some DECENT images. Don't have to be perfect.

Thanks,
Marc

Check out FormZ Radiozity... I haven't really delved into the rendering aspect, but as a modeller, FormZ is pretty easy to use. It might be a good fit for you.

Given the time, here's what I'd do:

First, is it interior or exterior?

For exterior:

1. Max, version 5+, use Light Tracer. It gives excellent results, but takes a long time to render. It's as close as they come to 'one click', you just pay for it in rendering time.

Setup:
Light Tracer, 1 bounce (any more will exponentially increase your rendering time)
Directional light with raytraced shadows (for the sun)

That's it.

For interiors, it's a whole different game. It'd be tought to learn in a week. I'd suggest looking for 'fake GI' for interiors, it'd be the fastest way to get something decent with little experience, but it won't be great.

I love FormZ, but it's a dog for rendering. Use Max.

I missed the 16 hours part.
Forget the interior with 16 hours. I'd even say LT will be hard, as it will take a year to render.

Well, when I said 16 hours, I meant that I'd only like to spend 16 hours learning the program. If I have to set up a final render that takes another 8 hours, that's fine too. I've got 2 weeks to get the images perfected, I just don't want to spend too much time learning software at this point because it's not the centerpiece of my portfolio, by any stretch -- it's just to show that I have a basic understanding/competency in 3D modeling.

I will be doing exteriors only... not going to mess with interiors!

What about materials and landscaping? I have some in my sketchup model, but would I be better off applying/tweaking those in 3DS Max?

Thanks...

Marc

Parinesi 4.0 if you build a model in sketchup with decipline in your material selection then Shadows and lighting techniques are very simple to use.

This program is essentially a photoshop for architectural renderings.

You should be fine using Light Tracer - it looks basically as good as a GI rendering from Mental Ray, Final Render, Vray, whatever, just takes 100 times longer. Go through the tutorials in the hellp files, should only take an hour or so, and you'll be good to go.

Keep materials simple. You may be able to export as a 3ds files and keep some. It's not too hard to put textures on in Max.

1. Select object
2. Apply UV Modifier
3. Apply Material
4. Adjust UV modifier

I'd spend the time making it look nice as a soft light tone color, then worry about mats later. GI looks pretty nice with just soft colors.

So I take it Light Tracer is a 3ds Max plug-in? I'll have access to 3DS Max 7 tomorrow, which apparently has Mental Ray 3.3 built in, but if you think I'll be better off with Light Tracer I'll try to find it. Looking at some screen shots of Mental Ray, it does look quite complicated. But hey, I'm up for experimenting as long as I can do lo-rez renderings quickly to test my results...

Anyway, thanks for the info.

Marc

ive heard mental ray is quite difficult if you want to get desired effects out of it, but if you are just making something quick and dirty, its pretty easy..

The dumbest renderer I've seen is ArtLantis - it's pretty much a drag-and-drop texturer/renderer. Certainly not the best renderer out there, but not awful and arguably the easiest to use. You just scroll through the various material "shaders" and pick what you need, then click it onto your model's parts or faces. It has very easy basic lighting and ability to do fly-arounds and virtual panoramas. ArtLantis was originally developed as a sidekick to ArchiCAD, but it works with any typical 3D model format.

Light Tracer comes with Max 5 and up. It's a plugin, but all of Max is that way, so I'd say that it's more a part of it than Mental Ray.

I would stay away from Mental Ray, you'll just kill yourself. Light Tracer is the easiest rendering solution I've ever seen, just the slowest, too.

you can always seperate the building from the landscape aspect of an image as far as 3D modeling goes. it cuts down considerably on rendering time (especially with trees and their shadows...).

its not a difficult task to make some artsy looking trees in photoshop on rendered images. that way it you take some of the emphasis off of the rendered buildings. I tend to scrutinize an image less if is a collage, as opposed to a purely 3D render. anyway it is much easier to steal images off of google and photoshop them in than it is to get the damn things to tile properly in viz/max/sketchup...

try edit>transform>distort in photoshop. that allows you to anchor the 4 points of an image independant of each other. that way you can just match each corner to where a face/plane rendered in perspective.

voila! instant 3D...

Trace --

You make it sound so easy! I started fooling around with Max 7. I did the short tutorial on applying materials to objects but I am finding that it is a lot easier said than done to "select the object."

I am unable to import Sketchup's 3DS export, but the DXF export works. It is very difficult for me to select the correct objects in Max. I have tried selecting by name (because many of my compoonents were named in Sketchup) but when I try to apply materials (from the material editor) it does not work or simply colors the lines that define the objects and not the faces. I find that when I click the facade of my building it selects all sorts of things inside the building but not the face of the building itself. I've been clicking mainly in the perspective window.

So I guess this is why I was able to pick up Sketchup so quickly but have never tried max...

P.S. I never did find the "Apply/Adjust UV Modifier" commands...

Marc

Okay, okay, I'm finding things now... heheh. Yes, I'm a newbie at this. Anyway, I found the selection options and I've been able to select faces and apply materials and whatnot. Onward ho...

Marc