Category: 3DSMax

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More on the Ultimate Rendering Node!

Hello All, i am john writting on along with my friend 3d man
we have a question or would love anybodys option on the topic of
rendering.

We are wanting to do the highest quality rendering using mental ray
we have tried and few things but we are not getting the results we
have hoped. We havea total of 8 systems which we are wanting to set up
for network rendering. Our questions are do we need to have our PC
systems with all the same hardware and software configurations or can
we set up network rendering with systems which each have different
hardware.

If anybody has any exprience or even some opinions on this topic
we would be so happy to hear back. I also hope that this can help
others who may want or attempt to do the same thing.

There are 2 books specifically about mental ray here:
http://www.amazon.com/Realistic-Architectural-Visualization-3ds-menta…

The problem is that you threw out some pretty subjective requirements:

“Ultimate Rendering”
“Highest Quality Rendering”
“..not getting the results we have hoped.”

You probably won’t get too many people volunteering any help until you
clear up what it will take to make you happy.

As for NR/DR (net render or distributed render), you should know that
you are limited to backburner with 3ds, and that means net render.
This may not be what you want. Net render assigns an entire image/
frame (they’re all frames to 3ds) to a single box. It “deals” out the
frames as soon as a box in the subset of the farm you’ve assigned to
the job becomes available.

So you won’t see any speed improvement when doing a single frame. In
fact, the job may well go to the slowest box in the farm. For DR (more
than one box can work on a single frame), you need a custom renderer,
like V-Ray (what I use), or an appliance designed to DR behind the
scenes.

As a guideline, you need the same software on all your farm’s nodes.
They also need access (locally or network) to all the files required
by the job, (and here’s the important part) and called/located in the
same place. If you share your maps/materials/scripts/plugins from
drive V: on the master node, that drive, and those files, need to be
accessible from each node via that same drive letter and path. Also
see: this page.

So can you shed any light on what your requirements are? Be sure to
include your financial requirements, because if you really want the
“Ultimate Rendering Setup”, then price must not be an object!

Bogus Exception

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“Detach” -ing splines and primitives

“I made a torus primitive and want to detach a section of it. When I select splines or quads and detach as element or copy, the detached part won’t select by itself; the whole torus is still selected. How can I make the detached section a completely independent object?”

You mention both splines and torus primitive. Splines and the menu that torus’ come from (primitives) are not the same, so I can’t be sure which you mean. Maybe you mean both? You mention editable spline, which only splines can be converted to, yet you also mention “quads”, which may mean a polygon (mostly 4 sides) in an editable mesh/poly, which is really just 2 faces. Forgive me, therefore, if the following has no application to your project. Feel free to fill in the blanks.

Continue reading ““Detach” -ing splines and primitives”

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Changing materials programmatically in 3ds max

I’ve been thinking about ways to render in such a way that wouldn’t
require starting and stopping max for each picture. I thought of techniques I use to do lots of camera shots overnight.

Idea #1: If one were so inclined, time could be saved by animating the
material(s). I would suggest a blend material, using auto key, and
swapping out each material with each keyframe. Make each keyframe a
single frame right after the last one. Then export your frames as
individual images, as all animations should be. Works with NR (Network Render), too.

FYI: You can’t change the material type if you are animating a material.

Idea #2: Create an AVI or MOV that has in each frame the material you
want. This is for simple, non-compound materials, of course. Then
simply apply the movie as a material, and continue as above.

Note: When animating stuff like materials and all things that are not
positional/rotational in the root, you should see a set of red
brackets, the same as with “open” groups in the viewers, around the
widgets/parameter thingies that are being animated.

Don’t ask why, but sometimes setting manual keys does not work, and you need to use “auto key”. Personally, I think auto key creates risk when animating, and this may not be a bug… it may just be a retarded way to do it.

Another caution is that animations of any kind can be adjusted to
loop, stop, yo-yo, etc. when done. Get familiar with the curve editor
and dope sheet, using them as often as you use layers and the light lister.

Bogus Exception

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Applying a bitmap of the sky to a sphere…

You just need a sphere/hemi-sphere and an image that looks OK when applied to a spherical environment/object:

1. Open the .max file.
2. Hit “m” to open the material editor.
3. In the first open slot, click either the “Get Material” icon, or
use the pull-downs.
4. Select “bitmap”.
5. Navigate to your sky image.
6. Select the dome.
7. In the material editor, click “Assign Material to Selection”, or
use “Assign to Selection” from the pull-downs.
8. Render.

Posted on

What is “Normal”?

Hi all

These days I’m working on interactive 3d walkthrough so we
requirment is to render the plan or surfaces from one side only (we r
using direct x tech. to render the scene) .So as a 3d modeler my duty
is to make sure that plane or surface should render fron the required
side only (so i used the flip command to ) and sometimes we need to
render from bothsides without using force two sided where the problem
arises ,can anyone help to sort it out

I don’t know anything about “direct x tech”, but if you are using 3ds max, you can use 2 objects back to back if you like. One thing to keep in mind is that when you create 2 objects that are supposed to represent both sides of a single object, you need to find a workable way to keep them together in the right orientation. Depending on what you are doing (still, animation, etc.) this can be done with combinations of constraints, hierarchies or even compounds.

Another approach that keeps the object count low is to use the handy-dandy “Shell” modifier. With it you can do things like specifying 0 for inner and outer shell thickness and effectively turn any object in 3ds into an object that can be seen/rendered from both “sides”. Used in excess, this increases the face count, so be sure to keep that in mind.

There is only one drawback to the method I am suggesting as compared to Mike’s. If you plan to apply a different material to each side of a plane, say, that has a shell modifier applied, you can’t do it with a “Top/Bottom” material or a “Multi/Sub-Object” material. The same material is applied to both “sides”. This is true, by the way, even if you cut up/divide the object as an editable mesh/poly.

So now you have 2 approaches to choose from, based on your needs.

Hope that helps!