Be very detailed on your model, and start building a materials library...

But the most important thing is Ligthing...Lighting...Is the secret

ahh ok i'll see wot i can do. wot about the detail of the materials when you apply them to a object, sometime i just get a block colour and sometimes i get the texture of the material?????

There is no secret and there is no quick solution. You just have to keep messing with it and the more you get used to it, the better you will be at making good rendering.

The main thing for now is to focus on perfecting one thing at a time. First make sure you understand how UVW maps work. So when you apply a texture to your model, you must adjust the texture's UVW map so that it is to the same proportion of your model.

Then figure out the best default lighting systems. if you want light to project from within the building like a night rendering, put in omni lights. If you want a day rendering you will want to play with a mixture of things such as a day lighting system, skylights, exterior omni lights with high multiplier, or what I did that was helpful was placing several target direct lights.

The way to go these days with really sexy renderings is the v-ray renderer plug in. But don't worry about that until you've figured out the requisites.

Vray and Simian materials

John, have you ever used finalRender?

1. Lighting
2. Keep your lighting simple
3. Lighting
4. Keep your lighting simple
5. Lighting
6. Keep your lighting simple
7....

finalRender is just as good as any of the other ones. All comes down to the end user.


I rely on patience and praying...quite simple, really.

for textures, get them right in 3d max; for lighting, never underestimate the power of photoshop post-editing.

Good point ov. Always post-process in Photoshop. Always.

I agree it's all in the lighting, and I also really reccomend getting the Vray plugin. It simplifies the lighting for you. Most exterior renderings that I do involve just the Vray sun for shadow, and an HDRI map...that's it. For interiors, the lighting is a little more intricate, but not much.

chamfer and filet your edges whenever possible!

'real' objects never have those nasty 90 degree edges...3ds max 9 has arch design mats that actually do it for you automatically, but those of us who are not fortunate enough to have the new version must do it one edge at a time.

learn how to manually light your model. vray and other plugins are awesome, but too many users rely on it without a basic understanding of what your lights are actually supposed to do.

basic technique for lighting manually:
-start with a single omni that emits only ambient light [under advanced settings] and set it to .5 or so
-render
-tweek the omni's intensity until it looks like a dark night...these will be the darkest parts of your model that do not receive light [simulates GI]
-add more lights, one at a time and always start @ lower intensities than you think you really need
-slowly build up your lights and you will always have complete control over your lighting [no praying involved!]

the time you spend lighting your model manually will be saved with much quicker renders and far more control....

good luck and keep posting. for some reason, we love talking about how much we know about max.

o yea...increase the contrast in ALL of your lights' settings to @ least 50! that will help you to avoid flat renders.

also, if it doesnt look good in grayscale, it wont look good in color. test it accordingly. take breaks, relax your eyes, and ALWAYS use source images.

soft shadows are the key

a friend of mine who does professional work for architects, developers etc. tells me that the secret to doing good renderings with max is actually to use photoshop.

That's at least 50% of the final image (animations are different)

Interiors are different, too, and require much more skill

Where did the term "renders" originate? I always hear it from Europeans. Alex, are you European?

Anyhoo, I use V-ray for Rhino.

I don't know from where he is, but in southern Europe everyone calls them "rénders" as a short version of "renderings" .. which is .. um.. "too english" for southern latin speaking countries..

superduct,
that's an interesting route to light a scene but where do you put the first omni..?
I always hated omnis because for some reason I can't understand the trick to control its lighting effect... the closer to the model the less light it produces?

and I know it's been asked before but is there some kind of tool to "randomize" textures?.. for this floor for example?:

the key to omnis (and most lights) is the attenuation. You need to make sure that the fall off is far enough away (typical rule of thumb is that the atten. reachs the farthest edge of the room, from one end to the other).

This will give a nice soft shadow (which is essentially what makes GI look 'warm').

Start in the center of the room, copy omin to increase intensity (when faking GI you can easily have 10-30 lights for one room).

Once you have a nice soft light (the large attentuation of the shadows will make the shadows so soft that you will not see edges, just like GI does) throughout the room, then begin adding groups of omnis for things like windows (I typically start with 4 per window).

For exteriors, use a sky dome. Same thing applies with the attenuation.


If you are using GI, then you won't need to know about the above. But it is a good idea to understand how light and shadows work together. The first obvious sign of inexperience are hot spots and hard shadow lines.

I don't have max open in front of me, but I I use a similar method. When outside, I use a skylite, and a single directional with the attenuation cranked to max. I always set the skylight to about .5, and the Dirctional to .6-.8. I've got a couple other tricks up my sleeve, but I honestly can't remember them with out Max in front of me. I haven't used it since may, and I drank away most of my short term memory over the duration of the summer. I'll drop my numbers and a couple of rederings on here after I get moved and school starts back up.

trace,
thanks for the tips, but.. 30 lights in just one scene?!? and then you add more? ... I try not to use to many lights because it complicates the file a bit.. I don't think I've ever used more than 8 or 9 lights in one file.. I guess that's just for the interiors, how many lights do you use for exteriors? and what kind of lights? are omnis on the outside useful? I never use them (I should learn to master the attenuation options as you say..)

rfuller,
just one directional? (the one with shadows I guess)... I usually put at least 3 or 4 directionals (only one with shadows.. the others to light the dark parts a bit).. it would be nice to see some examples (we'll wait 'til school starts)

Medit, you only need one if you adjust the Bump on your Rendering settings. I'll make out a list and show some fair examples in a couple weeks.

Medit, one thing that will help your texture out a lot is to put a UVW map on it.

Just selct the layer that you applied your material to, click on the modifier list, then select 'UVW-map'. Then take it off of the 'real world map' and make manual adjustments to it. play around with the numbers until it looks acceptable.

Also under the rendering menu go to the environment menu and reduce the tint to your model

this thread rules keep it coming i love you all.
lots photoshop time is needed for sure
do you guys make/modify your surfaces/textures in photoshop?

the method no one taught you in school.
I use this with V-Ray but it works almsot exactly the same with mental ray.

build you model. make or get materials

render your initial pass using an hdri as an envrionment map with no lighting. set up your hdri with the GI settings

from this point begin lighting the scene. group similar lights in groups.

render each group out with all GI turned off

assemble in each pass as a layer in photoshop

tweak...each layer, add masks, backgrounds etc....

theres also a program called shake used to assemble these passes in video form...after affects and adobe pro wont do this correctly.

You can save just about any effect as a pass, then adjust in post.

Medit - when I use scanline rendering (which isn't often, times change), I woudl use two layers of omnis - one at say 2.5' off the ground, the other at say 7.5' off the ground. This would essentially double the lights but provide a more uni-directional light to the room (this helps when you are close to objects, to avoid hot spots). The goal is to see the shadows, but never have traces of where the light is coming from.
Use different lights for the directional light.
Make sure that the omnis are all copies, so you can turn them all off/on with one click, adjust their color/intensity/etc. all at once.


I tried to find some old links, but they are dead...

More lights won't affect the render time, as long as you don't have any raytracing from the lights and have some ram (soft shadows are ram, raytracing is processor. GI sucks 'em both!)

The only draw back to the soft shadows is if you have any opacity/transparency maps - they won't work.


Exterior - sky dome all the way. For simple scenes, it'll look as good as GI (the only problems are when you have buildings/objects close to eachother). You can download some good ones online. Omni's will take longer to render than point/cone/directional lights, but I doubt it's anything to worry about these days.

Make sure you exclude the ground plane from the shadows of the lights that are below the horizon!


Best advice is to study photography and the real world. I've seen a billion renderings done with Vray/etc. that suck and many done with old school techinques that are amazing.

It's all in the eye of the artist, not the software.

^^^ yes, but knowing what the software can do helps a lot... ;)
thanks trace (and others) for all the advice!

medit-

an omni light can be viewed as 6 spotlights clustered into one light where each one shines out at exactly 90 degrees from the next [i.e. a cube with each side a light]. the angle of incidence at which a light strikes a surface is what influences the degree to which a light actually lights a surface. 90 degrees is full intensity, 45 degrees is 50 percent intensity, etc. when attenuation is not used, the omni effects a surface consistenly from any distance. for example, if one wall in your scene is too dark, you can add an omni that is 100' [or other random far distance] from the wall at an angle of incidence of 90 degrees [perpendicular to] and an intensity of .1. slowly increase the light's intensity until the desired result is achieved. to take this example a step further, you can even utilize the 'include' feature of the omni and select the wall to be lightened. that will isolate the wall and not effect any of the other lighting in the model.

trace is correct about soft shadows...they definitely give your image that extra kick of reality. in addition to the attenuation, try using MR omnis or spots and utilize the 'area light' parameter [o yea, switch your render engine to mental ray]. area lights make the shadows cast from objects have a controllable degree of softness. you control the overall softness by changing the size of the area light. a setting of 1"-3" works fine for interiors but exteriors require some testing since the main light is normally not in the same spot every time. using this feature adds a lot of time to rendering, so when you are doing test renders, switch the feature off. make sure the lights of the same intensity are INSTANCES of each other [earlier in the conversation, someone mentioned COPY, which is incorrect]. this way, shutting the area light on and off requires only one click.

also, the quality of the soft shadows is controlled under the same rollout and is in terms of u and v samples. 5 and 5 is fine for tests, but you should try 7s or higher for finals.

good luck.

Medit, to "randomize" textures, the best choice (apart from costly plugins) might be to learn how to use procedural maps. 3dsmax has a several maps (like cellular, noise, dent etc), which tweaked and combined, can produce quite nice results:

Introduction to Procedural texturing

I agree that procedural is the way to go to get randomness. But on larger patterns, like the floor, procedural sometimes makes unpredictable, and unrealistic results.

To get the best results I like to make a map for the entire floor. Then of course you can use it again on other projects.

superduct,
thanks a lot... -I think I'll save this thread in my del.icio.us site... lots of useful info here-
I already knew what the omni does (the six-faces cube) but somehow I can't control them at all.. I guess I just need more practice. When I discovered the include/exclude parameter I started using too many lights for different objects.. in the end I had so many lights I didn't even remember which light corresponded to each object, so the file became a mess of omnis, focus, directionals, etc..
I have never used vRay or Mental Ray or any of those programs, always modelled in AutoCAD and rendered from 3DSMax... which of those softwares would be the easiest to learn? .. I've been using Max for 5 or 6 years and never thought I'd need any extra program but I probably need some help lighting my scenes..

a,f,
thanks, I'll check that one out.

garpike,
what do you mean with "make a map"?.. I have created textures (single .jpgs) with scans of wood or stone from catalogues in the past but everytime I use them in Max I find the same problem (I once created a 9x9 mosaic of 9 different scans of the same type of stone but when applied to a big .3ds model didn't look too good -repetition again-... do you create predefined mosaics in Photoshop or something like that? I could create a, lets say, 50x50 mosaic of scans but that would take too much time

Stay away from Mental Ray, imho. Stick with VRay or Final Render.

The advantage to not using MR or VRay is that it is super fast to render (the last animation I did this way took around a minute per frame to render) and it is predictable (no GI flickering or a billion tests).
As soon as you turn MR on, you are using GI, which will exponentially complicate things, suck resources dry and take a gazillion years to render correctly.

That said, GI is the way to go for the highest quality.



Procedural Maps - I never use 'em. Too resource intensive (slows things down when rendering) and unpredictable, like gp mentioned.


Tile Tricks - use the Tile procedural map (oops, maybe I do use 'em), add a bitmap in the diffuse slot, then adjust the random shading to get a "random" look to the texture.
This gives you a bitmap for the texture, but a random procedural look overall.

FYI - don't underestimate the effect materials will have on render times. Last time I did tests (2 years ago or so), just changing the stainless material tripled the render time!

Keep 'em simple, focus on lighting, do the rest in post production.


Time is money ;-)

this is a matter of personal taste, but i strongly disagree with trace about not using mental ray. my point is that u can use mental ray without GI by manually faking it as i explained above. to really get nice results, u can add an ambient occlusion pass to get those nice GI shadows. simply add the AO layer in pshop with a multiply layer blending mode knocked down to about 50-75% opacity.

when i do animations, i animate the whole entire video with an AO pass and add it in after effects in the same way i would in pshop. this eliminates any flicker and gives you complete control over your GI, i.e. you can lower or raise the opacity on that one layer for complete control over how your animation looks.

Medit, I mean make a texture map the size of the floor. No tiling.

Not a great example, but I get fed up with repeated patterns so I made one big concrete floor map. I do this with wood floors as well.

Medit, sorry for the short answer. I use Photoshop to create the map. I find large maps when possible, which takes some time in itself, but with things like wood floors i reconstruct them in Photoshop. Tedious, but you only need to do it once.

Here's a great place for larger textures:
http://mayang.com/textures/index.htm

Some companies offer demo textures to get you to buy their product. I'll post one I use once I find it...

Also, I agree with trace. Keep it simple. You'd be surprised how well a low-res texture works.

OK guys, garpike's post of his render prompted me to ask this question. Whats the best way to produce glass? I've always had trouble with getting glass to work properly. Any pointers?

good glass depends on how it'll be used. Keep in mind that raytracing adds to render time, particularly when refraction/reflection are both calculated.

For exteriors, you don't need any refraction, keep it simple, just play with the reflection and opacity of the material. Make it a med-dark color.

For interiors, you'll need the refraction for realism. You can get away without for a lot of things, but you will need it for close ups, particularly for things like transparent vases (don't forget the refraction of the water!).

There's also falloff, etc. Honestly, most of the standard glass mats that come with GI engines are pretty good (only thing you may want to tweak is the reflection - sometimes it's nice to control that).