I did it in Max 7 with Light Tracer and Dreamscape for the sky... feel free to laugh! It's just an exercise to familiarize and demonstrate that I have some basic 3d aptitude.
Anyway, if you have any suggestions (on the rendering), I'm happy to hear it.
I like the sky. Add some drama to it by putting some interior lights on. Soft, yellowish lights will add a lot (use the omni lights with falloff on, soft shadows, and low intensity - it's usually better to duplicate the lights than change the intensity a lot, start low, then add).
Some context would help, but I'd start with a better camera angle, get closer.
Interior lights is a great idea... unfortunately, I've had a problem or two with getting the glass to work properly for the upstairs windows. The windows have some silly detailing on them that was created as polygons in Sketchup, and unfortunately Max sort of bundles those together with the pane of glass... in other words, when I change the material to Max glass, the detailing disappears.
Another quirk I've noticed is that the materials that did import from Sketchup (.DXF) do not show up in the material editor, nor are they extractable using the eyedropper tool. This means that I am having a hard time replicating the materials that were imported, and so I may have to simply replace them.
As for context, I will either paste in some "ghosts" using photoshop or perhaps try to make duplicates that will render in wireframe to sit next to the fully rendered model. It was a design I did for a competition (but just for fun, being that I have never done this before) for narrow house lots (25' wide) with a front entry garage required.
As for the camera angle... you suggest getting closer... should I just allow it to crop or maybe change the field of view to give it a stronger perspective look? I did a closer rendering earlier and it was stronger but I was concerned about the cropping.
I will also try to add some foliage with the included EasyNAT plug-in... unless you think there's a better/faster way!
Just a suggestion, not meant to be taken as me being overly critical, because this is definitely a great start, but my suggestion would be to nix the sky. Things like a sky background or clouds above a rendering were impressive to clients/professors about 10 years ago when few people had the know-how to make these effects happen and so they were rarely seen. Now, clients and professors alike understand that adding a sky like that is a 10 second job of selecting a map, and it's often a tool that is terribly abused/misused. (I do commend you for not going overboard on a cloudy, bright blue map or anything). If nothing else, a sky can be added in Photoshop later as part of context from photographs. That might be nicer than seeing a fakey rendered cloudscape.
I should explain further regarding the window/detailing problem. I have not found out how to add a face to a wireframe polygon in Max. My driveway, the default green part imported as a wireframe instead of faces, for instance. How do I fill those and apply materials?
Perhaps tonight I will try to figure out how to apply new detailing to the windows so that I can use transparency and interior lights...
First thing is to make sure you don't have flipped normals.
Easiest way to do this is go to the materials, check 2 sided, and see if it fills in the hole.
If not, select the object, right click and convert it to an editable poly, go to the face sub obejct mode, Create, and make a new face (there will be little blue dots, start by clicking on one and keep going until you make a new face).
For the windows, select them, go to the modify panel, and select the polygon sub mode, go back and select the glass, back to the modify panel and click DETACH. That will turn the glass into a separate object.
As for the sky, well, he didn't say anything about school or a professor. It really depends on your audience. For school, or even some competitions, skies tend to distract from the design. But it depends on how you want to sell it. More often than not, in school and competitions, skies don't appear, just as photo realism doesn't, because of the time. It takes time to make something photo real, but it doens't take any time to leave it as 'abstract'.
It all comes down to selling your audience. Personally, I think the sky is very tasteful. Not too distracting and enough contrast to bring focus to the building.
MMatt is correct, though, that you can render it out with an alpha channel and composite later. I am not sure, though, were the '10 years ago' came from. I was in school 10 years ago and there weren't any skies!
Care to share your Dreamscape settings? I am just about to get into it (been through a few tutorials, but haven't had time to experiemtn).
No prob, I understand. I'm just playing around for now so I wanted to see if I could make a sky that wasn't too cheesy. I'm going for a dusk look and if I can put all the elements together so that it looks decent (reasonably well executed), then I will be happy. It's for my grad school application portfolio, to show that I have basic competency in computers despite a lack of architectural experience.
Trace --
Thanks for the procedures... I will try that later tonight. I'll share my Dreamscape settings but honestly I just fooled around until I got something I liked. Happened by chance, really. I'll post what I can later tonight, though there are a ton of settings. If you know a good way of sharing them en masse, let me know.
A few more questions about Max 7:
I am using a skylight that has pretty diffuse shadows. It's set to a multiplier of about .85, whereas the spotlight in the entryway is set to about 1.3. As you can see in the rendering, the spotlight is considerably brighter but the building facade is still legible. But when I placed that spotlight in the entryway, the view of my building (in the Perspective view) went completely dark, as if to say that the relative strength of the spotlight far outbalanced the skylight. The rendering proves that not to be the case.
In order to fix this problem I somehow turned off the rendering of lights in that viewfinder, which allows me to work with my model with ease but does not show the lighting effects, which is annoying. Is there some way to correct this problem in the Shapes + Lights view, or whatever it is that is default (I'm not looking at it here at work)??
I am still on Max 6, not sure what you are using for real time previews.
Try right clicking on the name (like Perspective) in the upper left corner, go to Config, select the standard lighting option (leave on 1 light). This will put it at the default and illumintate everything - it's what I use to work with.
For sharing, just take a Print Screen, crop in PShop, and post. I just haven't had time to play with Dreamscape. Looks like fun, though.
FYI - I agree with MMatt that restaint needs to be used for school work. As you didn't say what it was , I assumed it was personal work. For my competitions and for past school work, I rarely, if ever, used skies that looked 'real'.
Your call, though, just don't let it dominate your work. For clients, it's nice because it puts it into some sort of tangible arena, for school applications, you want to focus on your creativity.
Look around at what some of the more contemporary architects are doing for skies and back grounds (ie, Morphosis has gone from black bgs to bluish skies, most likely due to the audience that is seeing and judging them, but it still looks nice and subtle).
I find that MAX/VIZ have a hard time when you import a drawing from another program, so it's best to model natively in max or viz.
I agree with the others about the sky and interior lights. I usually use a black sky because it's not distracting, and actually adds a quite a bit of drama, especially when you use interior lights. Everyone knows that the world looks much more interesting during the night, at least in my own opinion.
Also, don't underestimate the power of photoshop. For a while I was obsessed with finding realistic looking people and context models. That's a waste, because unless they're highly complex, they look incredibly fake anyways -- and if they're complex, they kill your render time. I made some black silhouettes as templates in photoshop. I prefer vagueness so as not to detract from my design.
I was able to make the faces on my driveway, but when I try to render, it says "The following object requires map coordinates and may not render correctly"... And sure enough, I can apply materials but they do not appear correctly in the viewfinder or in the rendering.
I'll try to post the Dreamscape paramaters, but I've never messed with prt scrn.
Here are the settings. Note the "Left" viewport for the position of the sun. Render daylight is OFF. Motion is irrelevant. Relevant settings are showing in the dreamscape window.
Also did what you suggested on the windows and unfortunately it didn't work... but I think that is because the trim is reverting to an editable spline and therefore is not rendering texture as such. Anyway, once I added the glass the render took FOREVER. Then I added an omni light and Max crashed while I was tweaking. Oh well back to try it again.
Take it easy and thanks for all the Max tutorials. :-)
My first rendering...
Hi folks...
So I played around with Max for a few hours last night. Try not to laugh. Here's my first Rendering:
[/img]http://us.f1.yahoofs.com/bc/3afb75f5/bc/Public+Access/withsky.jpg?BCjUcvBBZhdoPC4B[/img]
I did it in Max 7 with Light Tracer and Dreamscape for the sky... feel free to laugh! It's just an exercise to familiarize and demonstrate that I have some basic 3d aptitude.
Anyway, if you have any suggestions (on the rendering), I'm happy to hear it.
Thanks,
Marc
or
us.f1.yahoofs.com/bc/3afb75f5/bc/Public+Access/withsky.jpg?BCjUcvBBZhdoPC4B
crap, the url keeps changing...
try this:
f1.pg.briefcase.yahoo.com/bc/mpsyp/lst?.dir=/Public+Access&.view=l click on "withsky"
Looks good for your first rendering. I am not sure what is for but I would put some context in to liven it up a little.
I like the sky. Add some drama to it by putting some interior lights on. Soft, yellowish lights will add a lot (use the omni lights with falloff on, soft shadows, and low intensity - it's usually better to duplicate the lights than change the intensity a lot, start low, then add).
Some context would help, but I'd start with a better camera angle, get closer.
Thanks for the comments.
Interior lights is a great idea... unfortunately, I've had a problem or two with getting the glass to work properly for the upstairs windows. The windows have some silly detailing on them that was created as polygons in Sketchup, and unfortunately Max sort of bundles those together with the pane of glass... in other words, when I change the material to Max glass, the detailing disappears.
Another quirk I've noticed is that the materials that did import from Sketchup (.DXF) do not show up in the material editor, nor are they extractable using the eyedropper tool. This means that I am having a hard time replicating the materials that were imported, and so I may have to simply replace them.
As for context, I will either paste in some "ghosts" using photoshop or perhaps try to make duplicates that will render in wireframe to sit next to the fully rendered model. It was a design I did for a competition (but just for fun, being that I have never done this before) for narrow house lots (25' wide) with a front entry garage required.
As for the camera angle... you suggest getting closer... should I just allow it to crop or maybe change the field of view to give it a stronger perspective look? I did a closer rendering earlier and it was stronger but I was concerned about the cropping.
I will also try to add some foliage with the included EasyNAT plug-in... unless you think there's a better/faster way!
Thx,
Marc
Just a suggestion, not meant to be taken as me being overly critical, because this is definitely a great start, but my suggestion would be to nix the sky. Things like a sky background or clouds above a rendering were impressive to clients/professors about 10 years ago when few people had the know-how to make these effects happen and so they were rarely seen. Now, clients and professors alike understand that adding a sky like that is a 10 second job of selecting a map, and it's often a tool that is terribly abused/misused. (I do commend you for not going overboard on a cloudy, bright blue map or anything). If nothing else, a sky can be added in Photoshop later as part of context from photographs. That might be nicer than seeing a fakey rendered cloudscape.
.mm
I should explain further regarding the window/detailing problem. I have not found out how to add a face to a wireframe polygon in Max. My driveway, the default green part imported as a wireframe instead of faces, for instance. How do I fill those and apply materials?
Perhaps tonight I will try to figure out how to apply new detailing to the windows so that I can use transparency and interior lights...
First thing is to make sure you don't have flipped normals.
Easiest way to do this is go to the materials, check 2 sided, and see if it fills in the hole.
If not, select the object, right click and convert it to an editable poly, go to the face sub obejct mode, Create, and make a new face (there will be little blue dots, start by clicking on one and keep going until you make a new face).
For the windows, select them, go to the modify panel, and select the polygon sub mode, go back and select the glass, back to the modify panel and click DETACH. That will turn the glass into a separate object.
As for the sky, well, he didn't say anything about school or a professor. It really depends on your audience. For school, or even some competitions, skies tend to distract from the design. But it depends on how you want to sell it. More often than not, in school and competitions, skies don't appear, just as photo realism doesn't, because of the time. It takes time to make something photo real, but it doens't take any time to leave it as 'abstract'.
It all comes down to selling your audience. Personally, I think the sky is very tasteful. Not too distracting and enough contrast to bring focus to the building.
MMatt is correct, though, that you can render it out with an alpha channel and composite later. I am not sure, though, were the '10 years ago' came from. I was in school 10 years ago and there weren't any skies!
Care to share your Dreamscape settings? I am just about to get into it (been through a few tutorials, but haven't had time to experiemtn).
MMatt --
No prob, I understand. I'm just playing around for now so I wanted to see if I could make a sky that wasn't too cheesy. I'm going for a dusk look and if I can put all the elements together so that it looks decent (reasonably well executed), then I will be happy. It's for my grad school application portfolio, to show that I have basic competency in computers despite a lack of architectural experience.
Trace --
Thanks for the procedures... I will try that later tonight. I'll share my Dreamscape settings but honestly I just fooled around until I got something I liked. Happened by chance, really. I'll post what I can later tonight, though there are a ton of settings. If you know a good way of sharing them en masse, let me know.
A few more questions about Max 7:
I am using a skylight that has pretty diffuse shadows. It's set to a multiplier of about .85, whereas the spotlight in the entryway is set to about 1.3. As you can see in the rendering, the spotlight is considerably brighter but the building facade is still legible. But when I placed that spotlight in the entryway, the view of my building (in the Perspective view) went completely dark, as if to say that the relative strength of the spotlight far outbalanced the skylight. The rendering proves that not to be the case.
In order to fix this problem I somehow turned off the rendering of lights in that viewfinder, which allows me to work with my model with ease but does not show the lighting effects, which is annoying. Is there some way to correct this problem in the Shapes + Lights view, or whatever it is that is default (I'm not looking at it here at work)??
Thanks,
Marc
I am still on Max 6, not sure what you are using for real time previews.
Try right clicking on the name (like Perspective) in the upper left corner, go to Config, select the standard lighting option (leave on 1 light). This will put it at the default and illumintate everything - it's what I use to work with.
For sharing, just take a Print Screen, crop in PShop, and post. I just haven't had time to play with Dreamscape. Looks like fun, though.
FYI - I agree with MMatt that restaint needs to be used for school work. As you didn't say what it was , I assumed it was personal work. For my competitions and for past school work, I rarely, if ever, used skies that looked 'real'.
Your call, though, just don't let it dominate your work. For clients, it's nice because it puts it into some sort of tangible arena, for school applications, you want to focus on your creativity.
Look around at what some of the more contemporary architects are doing for skies and back grounds (ie, Morphosis has gone from black bgs to bluish skies, most likely due to the audience that is seeing and judging them, but it still looks nice and subtle).
I find that MAX/VIZ have a hard time when you import a drawing from another program, so it's best to model natively in max or viz.
I agree with the others about the sky and interior lights. I usually use a black sky because it's not distracting, and actually adds a quite a bit of drama, especially when you use interior lights. Everyone knows that the world looks much more interesting during the night, at least in my own opinion.
Also, don't underestimate the power of photoshop. For a while I was obsessed with finding realistic looking people and context models. That's a waste, because unless they're highly complex, they look incredibly fake anyways -- and if they're complex, they kill your render time. I made some black silhouettes as templates in photoshop. I prefer vagueness so as not to detract from my design.
Trace --
I was able to make the faces on my driveway, but when I try to render, it says "The following object requires map coordinates and may not render correctly"... And sure enough, I can apply materials but they do not appear correctly in the viewfinder or in the rendering.
I'll try to post the Dreamscape paramaters, but I've never messed with prt scrn.
Marc
Trace:
Here are the settings. Note the "Left" viewport for the position of the sun. Render daylight is OFF. Motion is irrelevant. Relevant settings are showing in the dreamscape window.
http://f1.pg.briefcase.yahoo.com/bc/mpsyp/lst?.dir=/Public+Access&.view=l
Also did what you suggested on the windows and unfortunately it didn't work... but I think that is because the trim is reverting to an editable spline and therefore is not rendering texture as such. Anyway, once I added the glass the render took FOREVER. Then I added an omni light and Max crashed while I was tweaking. Oh well back to try it again.
Take it easy and thanks for all the Max tutorials. :-)
Marc
You need to apply a UVW modifier to anything with a texture map to get it to show up correctly. That's the error you are getting.
Good luck.
Mpsyp
Looks like Sketchup. I like the perspective in the photo with the neighbors house.
I've haven't tried that yet. can you tell how that was done
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