Category: 3DSMax

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Tradeshow Booth: V-Ray Glass to the Rescue!

Part of being a Sales Engineer is knowing how to display a product/service in any setting-even trade shows. The best Sales Engineers have no boundaries on their imagination, and use all their tools in ways that were not thought of previously. This is why it is important to own all your own software. If you are waiting for your next appointment (or worse yet consulting), you will get rusty fast.

In this article I discussed easy glass with V-Ray. In the article above, only one image from this project was included. Since I get so many hits to that article (where the tutorial is), I thought it might be nice to include all the renders I did for that client.

I’ll just post all the pictures here, with links to the larger versions by just clicking the thumbnails below. But first I should set this up.

The client asked for a modern trade show component (not the whole booth) that would allow prospects to play with the futuristic controls. These controls and displays are for super-yachts, so it had to look good. You’ll see the PC driving everything underneath, as these exhibits need to be designed completely, with all aspects of their operation taken into consideration.

As an aside, this type of glass (with the reflective falloff) is my absolute favorite! It effectively conveys not just futurism, but realism.



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Plane Lighting

I came across this simple trick purely by accident when setting up lighting for a room full of furniture. I ended up supplying indirect/direct lighting for an entire scene with a single light and a plane. The great part of this technique is that it renders really fast.

For a test of how this works, setup a standard scene with a V-Ray Plane that has a checker diffuse. Add a teapot to the center of the scene, with any material. Lastly, add a standard Target Spot above the scene. Crank up the intensity multiplier to 3.0. The scene should look a little like this:


planelighting1.jpg

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Realistic V-Ray Glass for Solids

As discussed in previous posts, 3ds Max is a surface modeler. That means that materials on the surfaces of objects don’t take into account the thickness of the object. V-Ray has a clever tool for this that allows all kinds of fun, realistic effects-Translucency. V-Ray Translucency isn’t documented very well, and there is virtually no information on the internet about it. Today, we’ll take a look at how it works to make realistic glass.

First, lets set up the scene.

-3ds Max 9 SP1
-Floor: V-Ray plane with a Checker diffuse. Tiling 1 x 1 and black & white squares:


marblepic1.jpg

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Realistic Lighting is Hard… right?

I’m mostly concerned with realism in 3D. Making a rendering that people think is a photograph is a goal that makes things harder than they probably should be. While some may say that materials create realism, my vote is that lighting makes a bigger difference.

I’ll start out by saying that I am a V-Ray biggot. Finding a good lighting mechanism for realism has made me feel pretty let down by 3ds Max’s built in lights. My philosophy with regard to scenes is to use as few lights as possible, and obviously as few polys as possible as well. I have contemporaries that fill scenes with lots of lights, all kinds of lights, in an effort to make a scene lit properly. Even after I introduce them to Photometric lights, they can’t break the habit.

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