IntroductionWelcome| 00:00 | (Music playing.)
| | 00:03 | Hi! I am Aaron F. Ross and welcome to 3ds
Max Lighting and Rendering with mental ray.
| | 00:08 | 3D graphics have sparked a revolution in
image making and every year these tools
| | 00:13 | get faster, easier and better.
| | 00:15 | In this course, we assume that
you have basic skills in 3ds Max.
| | 00:19 | If you are a beginner, please check
out one of our introductory 3ds Max
| | 00:22 | courses here at lynda.com.
| | 00:25 | In this course, I will show you how
to achieve photorealistic renderings
| | 00:29 | using techniques such as:
| | 00:31 | applying mental ray materials, setting
photometric lighting, rendering glossy
| | 00:36 | surfaces with ray tracing, using
indirect illumination and selecting
| | 00:41 | appropriate special effects.
| | 00:43 | I have been teaching 3D graphics since
1999, and over the years, I have learned
| | 00:48 | many techniques and shortcuts
that I am happy to share with you.
| | 00:51 | So let's get started with 3ds Max
Lighting and Rendering with mental ray.
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| Using the exercise files| 00:00 | If you are a Premium member of the
lynda.com Online Training Library or if you
| | 00:04 | are watching this tutorial on a disk,
you have access to the Exercise Files used
| | 00:08 | throughout the course.
| | 00:10 | The Exercise Files are arranged by
chapter and you can see here, in my home
| | 00:15 | directory, which is Documents, I have
got a folder Exercise Files, and we have
| | 00:21 | got a folder for each chapter in the course, and
each one of these is actually a 3ds Max project.
| | 00:28 | We will be looking at creating
project folders in a moment, but I want to
| | 00:32 | just point out to you the most relevant
folders are scenes, sceneassests and renderoutput.
| | 00:39 | If you are a Monthly or Annual
subscriber to lynda.com and you don't have
| | 00:43 | access to the files, you can follow along and
you can do some of these steps in your own scene.
| | 00:49 | But just be aware that the exact
settings that I use in this scene probably
| | 00:54 | won't translate over into your scene.
| | 00:56 | But at least you will have an idea of
how to play around with them to get the
| | 00:59 | results that you want.
| | 01:00 | So let's get started.
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| Setting a project folder| 00:00 | Before we begin working, we need to
take care of a little bit of housekeeping.
| | 00:05 | 3ds Max is a project-based application,
so it's assumed that you have got a
| | 00:10 | project folder in which all of the
assets needed to render a particular
| | 00:14 | scene are contained.
| | 00:16 | So what are we going to do here now is
we are going to set some preferences and
| | 00:20 | we are going to create a project folder
for the course, or more specifically,
| | 00:23 | we're going to point at an
existing project folder.
| | 00:26 | So the first thing I want you to do is
go into the Customize menu of 3ds Max and
| | 00:30 | you will go into Preferences.
| | 00:33 | In the Files tab, you will see there is
an option here that says Convert local
| | 00:38 | file paths to Relative
and that should be enabled.
| | 00:41 | What that means is when you create a
new material, 3ds Max is going to track
| | 00:46 | the location of any bitmaps or any external
files relative to the current project folder.
| | 00:52 | So in the past, a lot of people have
had their own methods for managing their
| | 00:57 | assets in 3ds Max, but now we have
got a better way, which is just keep
| | 01:01 | everything inside one project folder.
| | 01:04 | So in order for that to work correctly,
we want to have this Convert local file
| | 01:08 | paths to Relative option enabled.
| | 01:11 | The next thing we need to do is either
create a project folder or point at an
| | 01:16 | existing project folder.
| | 01:18 | And since we are providing the
Exercise Files to you, we are going to be
| | 01:21 | pointing at one of those
project folders to begin.
| | 01:24 | In 3ds Max, however, there is a
single command to do both of these.
| | 01:29 | So in other words, whether you are
starting from scratch or whether you are
| | 01:32 | pointing to an existing project folder,
you are going to use this same command.
| | 01:38 | You can access that command in two ways.
| | 01:40 | You can go through the Application
button and go to Manage > Set Project Folder
| | 01:46 | or there is a shortcut just up
here on the Application caption bar.
| | 01:51 | Here you will see Project Folder and it
will tell you what your current project
| | 01:56 | folder is when you hover your mouse
over it, and then when you click on it,
| | 02:00 | you will get a dialog where you can browse.
| | 02:03 | So you will see here all the Exercise files.
| | 02:05 | What you are going to want to do at the
beginning of each chapter is to set your
| | 02:10 | project folder to the appropriate chapter.
| | 02:12 | Since we are starting from
chapter 1, I am going to click here on
| | 02:15 | 01_mental_ray_Concepts.
| | 02:17 | You will see a bunch here of
mysteriously named subfolders inside there and
| | 02:23 | those are all of 3ds Max's project
folders for different data types.
| | 02:27 | And again the relevant ones in this case
are scenes, which is where your 3ds Max
| | 02:32 | geometry scene files will be stored,
sceneassets, which is where images and
| | 02:38 | photometric data files will be stored,
and renderoutput, which is where your
| | 02:43 | finished renderings will be found.
| | 02:46 | The one thing you want to make sure
that you don't do is select one of
| | 02:49 | these subdirectories.
| | 02:51 | Because if you click on one of these,
what's going to happen is 3ds Max is going
| | 02:54 | to create a nested project
folder with this as the new root.
| | 03:00 | In other words, you will end up with
another set of mysteriously named folders
| | 03:04 | inside this one, and it will be very
confusing and when you try to do your
| | 03:08 | renderings, the bitmap files will
not be found and it will be a mess.
| | 03:12 | So be sure that you are selecting the
top level of the project folder that
| | 03:17 | corresponds to the root or the home base
of that project folder, and you want to
| | 03:22 | do that at the beginning of each
chapter of the course. Excellent!
| | 03:27 | So now we have got our
project set for the first chapter.
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1. ConceptsUnderstanding mental ray| 00:00 | What is mental ray?
| | 00:02 | Mental ray is a rendering engine found
in many 3D programs, 3ds Max and also
| | 00:09 | Maya, Softimage, Revit and others.
| | 00:11 | It was created by a company called
mental images from Germany and it's now been
| | 00:16 | bought out by NVIDIA Corporation.
| | 00:19 | Mental ray has been implemented in all these
different programs because it is so excellent.
| | 00:25 | It's actually a programming
language in its own right.
| | 00:28 | You won't be looking at programming
mental ray shaders in this course, but
| | 00:33 | just so you know, it's an incredibly
powerful and extendable engine that can
| | 00:38 | do almost anything.
| | 00:39 | The mental ray implementation within
3ds Max is very tightly integrated.
| | 00:44 | So a lot of times, you will be using
mental ray without even really realizing it.
| | 00:47 | Mental ray excels at near glossy
and diffused reflections and it uses
| | 00:53 | something called Global Illumination
to represent the way that light moves
| | 00:57 | among surfaces in a scene.
| | 00:59 | Let's take a look at a couple of examples here.
| | 01:03 | Here is a daylight shot from mental
ray and we have got physically accurate
| | 01:07 | daylight coming in through the windows,
illuminating the scene and bouncing
| | 01:11 | around to illuminate other surfaces.
| | 01:14 | So that's Global Illumination.
| | 01:15 | Here is an artificial lighting setup at night.
| | 01:20 | Similarly we have got light bouncing
off of surfaces to illuminate other
| | 01:23 | surfaces nearby and this is
actually physically accurate or
| | 01:27 | photometrically accurate.
| | 01:29 | So that in fact, if you are an
architect or interior designer, you can set up a
| | 01:34 | scene with a particular lighting scheme
and render it and know that that's what
| | 01:38 | that scene would actually
look like in the real world.
| | 01:41 | Now of course, you can also use
mental ray to render shots for a film or
| | 01:46 | cinematics for a game or whatever,
and you don't have to be physically
| | 01:49 | accurate, but you do have the ability
to be physically accurate and that's very
| | 01:53 | important and powerful.
| | 01:55 | Additionally, mental ray has some super-
advanced features that are outside the
| | 01:59 | scope of this particular course.
| | 02:01 | For example, something called image-
based lighting or acoustics, which are sort
| | 02:05 | of lens focusing effects when light
passes through a refractive medium.
| | 02:10 | It kind of focuses like a magnifying glass.
| | 02:13 | But we are not going to be looking at all of
the features in mental ray, in this course.
| | 02:17 | It's a pretty long course.
| | 02:19 | It's several hours long, but even in
that period of time, we are not able to
| | 02:22 | cover everything in mental ray. But
with what you have learned in this course,
| | 02:27 | you can create some pretty incredibly
startlingly photo real images and that's
| | 02:32 | what this is all about.
| | 02:33 | We are trying to fool the eye and
make images that look realistic.
| | 02:38 | So without further ado, let's go ahead
and get started in mental ray with 3ds Max.
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| Understanding local illumination| 00:00 | Upfront we'd like to talk a little bit
about local illumination. What is it?
| | 00:05 | How does it work?
| | 00:06 | Or more specifically, how doesn't it work?
| | 00:09 | Local illumination is the standard
lighting model for shading objects in 3D and
| | 00:15 | it's been used since the 1970s.
| | 00:16 | What we are going to do here is I am
going to make a very simple scene just to
| | 00:22 | illustrate to you, how it works and why we
need mental ray in order to get more realism.
| | 00:29 | Now, you don't need to open a
scene file or anything here.
| | 00:31 | You can just watch what I am
doing so you can get the concepts.
| | 00:34 | I am just going to create a
simple plane and a sphere.
| | 00:39 | I am going to select both of those
and just set their object color to white
| | 00:47 | to simplify things.
| | 00:49 | And I am going to create a light,
once again to illustrate how
| | 00:54 | local illumination works.
| | 00:55 | You will see I have got Photometric lights as
the default here and that's newish in 3ds Max.
| | 01:01 | It used to be that the
default was the Standard lights.
| | 01:05 | So let's take a look at those for a second.
| | 01:07 | We won't be using those in mental ray.
| | 01:09 | But again, I am just showing you
what the difference is between local
| | 01:13 | illumination and mental ray's
advanced global illumination.
| | 01:16 | I am going to create an Omni light and
I am going to move it up just by grabbing
| | 01:24 | my Move tool and move it up
in the Perspective View. Okay.
| | 01:29 | And you can see right away.
| | 01:32 | This is not really very accurate.
| | 01:34 | This is strange and unusual.
| | 01:36 | It doesn't behave the way
light does in the real world.
| | 01:38 | You will notice that as I move the light
downward, it becomes darker on my ground plain.
| | 01:48 | So that's an indicator right away that
this local illumination lighting model is
| | 01:52 | not physically accurate, and you are
going to get these bizarre affects, such as
| | 01:57 | surfaces becoming darker as the
light moves closer towards it.
| | 02:01 | So local illumination is cartoon lighting.
| | 02:05 | It's completely fake and it has no real
relationship to the way light works in
| | 02:10 | the real world, and therefore we need
mental ray and global illumination to get
| | 02:15 | extra super special realism.
| | 02:17 | So how does this local illumination work?
| | 02:20 | Well, it's very simple.
| | 02:21 | Let me tumble around here and show you.
| | 02:28 | Essentially, if a surface is pointing
towards a light, it will be illuminated.
| | 02:34 | If a surface, such as the back side
of this sphere, is pointing away from a
| | 02:38 | light then it will not be illuminated,
and that's all there is to it in the
| | 02:43 | local illumination model.
| | 02:44 | The reflection of light bouncing off
of surfaces is not taken into account.
| | 02:49 | You don't get any glossy or nearer
reflections, and you also don't get any
| | 02:54 | diffused reflections.
| | 02:56 | So in other words, you don't get any splash.
| | 02:59 | So if you want those realistic
diffused reflections, you can fake it without
| | 03:04 | using global illumination and I would
just like to share this with you really
| | 03:07 | quickly to show you that it is
possible to get these sorts of effects without
| | 03:12 | using global illumination.
| | 03:15 | This is an example scene file in which
I have placed a bunch of standard omni
| | 03:20 | lights around to simulate the
effect of global illumination.
| | 03:24 | So this is sometimes
known in the biz as fakeosity.
| | 03:28 | It's a reference to radiosity,
and it's very efficient actually.
| | 03:33 | Just so you know you have options.
| | 03:35 | We don't have to use
mental ray. You can fake it.
| | 03:37 | Of course, you have to
spend more time setting this up.
| | 03:39 | What I have done is I have created lights
out here that are actually colored lights.
| | 03:47 | You see this light is actually emitting
green light, in order to give the effect
| | 03:51 | of the bounce coming from the green wall.
| | 03:54 | Let's do a quick render
of that, so you will see.
| | 03:57 | So fakeosity is very fast, but it
takes a little bit longer to set up and you
| | 04:00 | have got to really think about it.
| | 04:02 | So we are going to be doing global
illumination in this course. I just wanted to
| | 04:05 | show you that there are other
ways of achieving similar effects.
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| Understanding global illumination| 00:00 | Let's take a look at a
scene using global illumination.
| | 00:04 | This is a standard test scene called
a cornell_box because it comes from
| | 00:09 | Cornell University, when they first
started developing global illumination
| | 00:11 | algorithms in the 80s.
| | 00:13 | So this is standard scene
that's used to illustrate how global
| | 00:17 | illumination works.
| | 00:18 | Global illumination is any rendering
method that takes into account the movement
| | 00:22 | of light along surfaces. So, bounced light.
| | 00:26 | Now, just to confuse you, mental ray
has a specific feature called "Global
| | 00:32 | Illumination", but that's really
only one type of global illumination.
| | 00:37 | The term really is more generic than that.
| | 00:40 | Mental ray has several different types
of global illumination built into it.
| | 00:44 | For example, it uses Ray Tracing for
glossy and nearer reflections and it uses
| | 00:49 | something called Final Gather for the
diffused reflections or the bounced light.
| | 00:54 | So in this scene, you will
see there is only one light.
| | 00:57 | So I have got this scene here.
| | 00:59 | It's called cornell_box and there's just
one light in the scene, and none of the
| | 01:04 | extra lights that you saw
when I did my fakeosity.
| | 01:06 | And I have already created some
renderings of this from this Camera View, so
| | 01:11 | you will be able to see what it looks like
with global illumination turned on and off.
| | 01:16 | So I am going to hit Alt+Tab and I am
going to go to my Windows viewer here, so
| | 01:21 | we can compare these.
| | 01:23 | So this is a rendering
with no global illumination.
| | 01:26 | There is no Ray Tracing and no Final
Gather in this scene and you can see it
| | 01:31 | doesn't look like much.
| | 01:32 | We don't get any bounced light
and we don't get any reflections.
| | 01:35 | I will step forward to the next file.
| | 01:38 | Here is one that has Ray Tracing enabled
and now you will see we get nice chrome
| | 01:43 | reflections on our test objects.
| | 01:45 | So this is Ray Tracing on but Final Gather off.
| | 01:50 | The next one we will see here is Final
Gather on but Ray Tracing off, and what
| | 01:55 | we have got is bounced light, we have
got green splash inside the shadows here,
| | 02:02 | red splash over here, but we don't have
the chrome nearer reflections because Ray
| | 02:06 | Tracing is disabled.
| | 02:08 | And then finally, the whole enchilada.
| | 02:10 | We have got both types of global
illumination active in this rendering.
| | 02:14 | We have Final Gather for the
diffused reflections and Ray Tracing for the
| | 02:19 | specular or glossy reflections.
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| Assigning the mental ray renderer| 00:00 | In order to get the benefits of mental
ray, you will first have to assign it as
| | 00:04 | your current production renderer.
| | 00:06 | There are a couple of different ways to do that.
| | 00:08 | One is to go up to the Render Setup
dialog on the Main toolbar. Render Setup.
| | 00:15 | Click that and you will go to the Common tab.
Scroll down to the bottom of the dialog.
| | 00:22 | You are looking for the Assign Renderer rollout.
| | 00:26 | Click on that and you will see there is
a row here for the Production Renderer.
| | 00:31 | To assign the Production Renderer, you
will click on the button on the right-hand side,
| | 00:34 | and simply choose mental ray as
your current Production Renderer and click OK.
| | 00:41 | And 3ds Max will remember
this setting for all your scenes.
| | 00:45 | When you start a new scene, it will
remember that you have chosen the mental ray
| | 00:48 | renderer from now on.
| | 00:50 | You will also see down
here it says Active Shade.
| | 00:53 | So that's a way of getting very high
quality rendering in the viewports, but
| | 00:58 | unfortunately it's not
compatible with mental ray.
| | 01:00 | So you are not even able to select
mental ray as the Active Shade renderer.
| | 01:05 | And I would also like to advise you not
to use Active Shade at all when you are
| | 01:10 | using mental ray, because
you may have stability issues.
| | 01:13 | So that's one way to assign
mental ray as your production renderer.
| | 01:19 | Let me show you the other way as well.
| | 01:21 | You can go into the Customize menu
and you are looking for Custom UI
| | 01:26 | and Defaults Switcher.
| | 01:29 | Inside here you have the ability to
change the default settings for how 3ds Max
| | 01:35 | behaves, over here on the left and
you also have the ability to change the
| | 01:40 | interface color scheme over here on the right.
| | 01:44 | So I could also just choose the Max
mental ray Preset and you will see it gives
| | 01:48 | you a summary of all the
changes it's going to make.
| | 01:51 | Additionally, I am going to choose
this light-colored interface here.
| | 01:55 | I have already done that in
the viewport as you can see.
| | 01:58 | So I am just going to use that from now on.
| | 02:01 | And I can click Set and I will need
to restart the program for all of those
| | 02:09 | settings to take effect.
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| Using the rendered frame window controls| 00:00 | We are going to take a look at the
rendered frame window controls now.
| | 00:04 | Once you have assigned mental ray as
your active renderer, when you render a
| | 00:09 | view by clicking the Render Production
button, you will see some extra goodies
| | 00:15 | at the bottom of the rendered frame
window, and these only appear when you have
| | 00:20 | mental ray as your active renderer.
| | 00:22 | The way these work is better quality is
achieved by moving these sliders to the right
| | 00:27 | and lower precision quality is
achieved by moving the sliders to the left.
| | 00:34 | And you will see you have got controls
for the Image Precision, for Shadows, for
| | 00:39 | Reflections and Refractions
and all kinds of stuff on here.
| | 00:43 | One thing that I would recommend is
when you are doing test renders to go
| | 00:47 | over here and choose Iterative
rendering and this just means it's not going to
| | 00:54 | save any files and it's turned off
a couple of other settings that are
| | 00:58 | designed for final output.
| | 01:01 | So while you are testing, you
should choose Iterative mode.
| | 01:04 | Additionally, you can turn this user
interface on and off by clicking this
| | 01:09 | button that says Toggle UI.
| | 01:12 | So let's say we wanted to
create a draft mode rendering setup.
| | 01:17 | I can even turn these sliders down,
maybe turn off Final Gather completely
| | 01:24 | and turn some of these other things just
completely off or maybe set to a very low level.
| | 01:31 | And once I have set all these settings,
then I can create a preset so I can
| | 01:36 | easily and quickly get back to that.
| | 01:39 | So up here, you will see Presets.
| | 01:41 | So I can click here and choose
Save and store a preset file.
| | 01:47 | So I will call this one Draft and press Enter.
| | 01:52 | Now, it asks me which aspects of the
renderer do you want to store in this preset?
| | 01:58 | I will say we will store all of those settings.
| | 02:01 | So that now I can choose these
different presets and load them in.
| | 02:07 | I can go back to my own that I have
just done, load that back in and
| | 02:14 | it remembers all the settings.
| | 02:15 | So that's how you can handily create
and recall rendered presets within the
| | 02:21 | rendered frame window controls.
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2. Gamma CorrectionUnderstanding gamma| 00:00 | In this chapter we are going
to look at Gamma Correction.
| | 00:05 | So you will be able to understand what
Gamma Correction is because it's very important.
| | 00:11 | If you don't use Gamma Correction in 3ds
Max then what's going to happen is your
| | 00:14 | renderings are going to look really washed out.
| | 00:17 | So what I have done here is I have
opened up this photograph that I have taken
| | 00:20 | of San Francisco's Mission
neighborhood and we are going to just add an
| | 00:25 | adjustment here so we can sort of
simulate the way that Gamma Correction works.
| | 00:30 | Now you don't need to necessarily
follow along with this, but we are just going
| | 00:34 | to take a look at it. So here we go.
| | 00:35 | I am going to add a Level adjustment
to this image by clicking here to add
| | 00:41 | a Levels adjustment.
| | 00:43 | And this center slider
is the Gamma of the image.
| | 00:47 | Gamma is the contrast curve of an image.
| | 00:50 | And right now it says it has a Gamma of 1,
which means that no change is being applied.
| | 00:56 | If I drag this slider over to the
right, reducing the Gamma to a fractional value,
| | 01:01 | you will see the image
becomes apparently darker and muddier.
| | 01:06 | If I drag the slider to the left,
increasing Gamma beyond 1, you will see that
| | 01:11 | it becomes lighter and more washed out. Okay.
| | 01:15 | So what is this all about?
| | 01:18 | Well, basically images and display
devices and capture devices all have Gamma
| | 01:24 | correction built into them, so that
when you view an image on your screen, for
| | 01:28 | example, it will be at the correct brightness.
| | 01:31 | Just as an aside, the Gamma setting for
a standard television or computer is 2.2.
| | 01:38 | If you are on the Macintosh, the default is 1.8.
| | 01:41 | So in fact, you should probably
set it to 2.2 if you are on the Mac.
| | 01:45 | Image files stored on your computer
have a Gamma setting built into them, and
| | 01:50 | what that does is it essentially
compresses information in the shadow areas
| | 01:55 | where we are most likely to not notice.
| | 01:59 | So that's fine for viewing an image on
the screen but if we wanted to apply this
| | 02:03 | to a surface and render it in mental ray,
then mental ray is going to have to be
| | 02:09 | told that the image has a certain
gamma in order for it to be able to
| | 02:14 | "uncompress that information".
| | 02:18 | So in other words, we need to set
gamma in 3ds Max if we want our textures to
| | 02:23 | be the right contrast.
| | 02:25 | And so that's a basic
introduction to the concept of Gamma.
| | 02:28 | Next we will take a look at 3ds Max
and how to set the interface correctly in
| | 02:33 | order to achieve the desired
results of good contrast on our textures.
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| Recognizing the symptoms of incorrect gamma settings| 00:00 | Now that you have understanding of what
Gamma is, we need to take a look at what
| | 00:06 | the pitfalls of incorrect gamma correction are.
| | 00:10 | Specifically, if you don't have
Gamma set correctly in 3ds Max, then your
| | 00:14 | renderings are going to look strange.
| | 00:16 | So here is another version of the
Cornell Box with some materials applied and
| | 00:21 | you will see there are some
bitmap images on the surfaces.
| | 00:25 | Those images are just from the
standard 3ds Max material libraries.
| | 00:30 | I have pre-rendered a
couple of versions of this.
| | 00:32 | One with Gamma off and one with
Gamma on, so you will see the difference.
| | 00:36 | So I am going to hit Alt+
Tab and go to my rendering.
| | 00:39 | So this is what it looks like with
Gamma turned off in 3ds Max and you will
| | 00:44 | notice there is even a difference
between the brightness of the texture in the
| | 00:49 | viewport versus the brightness
of the texture in the rendering.
| | 00:53 | So, again, this is with Gamma turned off.
| | 00:56 | Now if we look at the one with Gamma
turned on, the colors are much deeper, much
| | 01:01 | richer, and more saturated.
| | 01:03 | So if your renderings did not look
dark enough or don't have enough contrast,
| | 01:10 | then it's probably because
Gamma is disabled in 3ds Max.
| | 01:14 | You will note by the way that the
lighting is exactly the same here in both cases,
| | 01:19 | just toggling through them,
so you can see the difference.
| | 01:23 | So Gamma correction doesn't affect
the lighting and it doesn't affect flat
| | 01:27 | colors like this wall, which is just a
flat red wall set in the Material Editor.
| | 01:33 | Gamma correction does have a
significant impact on the contrast of bitmap
| | 01:38 | textures applied to surfaces.
| | 01:41 | So the moral of the story is here, if
you are working with mental ray,
| | 01:45 | you always have to consider whether Gamma is
turned on or off and it always need to be on.
| | 01:52 | So next, we will look at turning it on.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Applying gamma correction| 00:00 | Now that we have an understanding of
the symptoms of improper Gamma correction,
| | 00:04 | we are going to actually enable it in 3ds Max.
| | 00:07 | This is done through the Customize menu.
| | 00:09 | Go to the Customize menu and choose Preferences.
| | 00:13 | You'll need to go to the
tab labeled Gamma and LUT.
| | 00:16 | LUT stands for Lookup Table.
| | 00:18 | We are not using a Lookup Table here.
| | 00:20 | We are just using simple Gamma correction.
| | 00:21 | So what I am going to do is I am going
to enable it, and I want to make sure
| | 00:25 | that I have Gamma chosen here, not LUT,
but Gamma and I want to set the value to 2.2.
| | 00:31 | Additionally, in this Bitmap Files
section, this is very important as well.
| | 00:36 | We need to set both of these values to 2.2 also.
| | 00:39 | What this is doing is it's telling
mental ray to expect that an image applied
| | 00:45 | to a surface is going to have a Gamma
of 2.2 and it's also telling mental ray
| | 00:50 | when you render out an image, make sure that
the rendered image has a Gamma of 2.2 as well.
| | 00:57 | Additionally, we should also enable
these switches here, so that the colors
| | 01:01 | that we see in the Material Editor and
in color swatches will be correct and
| | 01:06 | accurate with Gamma enabled.
| | 01:10 | From now on 3ds Max will remember for
all new scenes that I want to have Gamma
| | 01:15 | correction enabled and additionally when
you open a scene, if Gamma is disabled,
| | 01:21 | 3ds Max will ask you if you want to disable it.
| | 01:25 | But you always want to keep
Gamma enabled from now on.
| | 01:28 | So we should be good to go now as long
as we are using bitmap textures and
| | 01:33 | our renderings will have the correct
contrast now that Gamma correction is enabled.
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|
|
3. Ray TracingUnderstanding raytracing| 00:00 | We are going to now take a look at the
concepts of ray tracings just briefly, so
| | 00:04 | you will have an understanding of how
it works and that will give you insight
| | 00:08 | into troubleshooting problems in 3ds
Max and also just generally understanding
| | 00:12 | how the process operates.
| | 00:14 | Ray tracing works by drawing lines out
from a camera into the scene to sample
| | 00:21 | the color of a particular pixel.
| | 00:24 | So for pixel in the image a ray is drawn
out from the camera to strike a surface.
| | 00:31 | Now if that surface is reflective then
additional rays will be generated out
| | 00:37 | from that surface in order to sample
nearby surfaces and those will then
| | 00:43 | contribute to the final color
of the pixel at that location.
| | 00:46 | So let's take a look at a rendered image here.
| | 00:50 | So in the case of this cone a ray is
drawn out here, because the cone is
| | 00:57 | reflective another ray is cast from
the cone and it's striking this cube and
| | 01:03 | then the cube is also reflective,
so that is generating additional rays.
| | 01:08 | So the final color here is green,
because in fact light is coming from the
| | 01:13 | green wall over here.
| | 01:15 | So basically it's a series of rays
cast out from surfaces in order to sample
| | 01:22 | other nearby surfaces and then when
that's all done and calculated, then we will
| | 01:27 | have a nice beautiful
rendered image such as this one.
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| Limiting the trace depth of reflections and refractions| 00:00 | Now that you understand how ray tracing
works, we can take a look at optimizing
| | 00:04 | the ray trace engine, so that we will
not get excessive render times, because
| | 00:08 | you will find if you have a lot objects
that reflect or refract bending light,
| | 00:13 | this is going to cause your
render times to be very, very long.
| | 00:17 | So you want to have control over this.
| | 00:19 | You don't want it to be in control.
| | 00:21 | You want to take the reins here.
| | 00:22 | So we want to prevent unnecessary
calculations from being performed.
| | 00:26 | So in the case of reflective objects,
you will see here we've got reflective
| | 00:31 | objects appearing in the reflections of
other objects and that's fine and that's
| | 00:36 | what we want here, because that's realistic.
| | 00:38 | But we don't want that to go on forever;
in other words we do want to have a
| | 00:41 | hall of mirrors effect where a ray is
bouncing back and forth here infinite
| | 00:45 | number of times or even tens of times,
even that is just going to be excessive
| | 00:49 | and we won't be able to
see it on the screen anyway.
| | 00:52 | So that's when limiting the
Trace Depth comes into play.
| | 00:56 | You will see at the bottom of the
rendered frame window a section here that
| | 00:59 | says Trace/Bounces Limits and this is
where you can set limits on the number of
| | 01:04 | times a ray can bounce.
| | 01:06 | You will see the default for Reflections
is 4, and that's actually probably more
| | 01:12 | than we need in most cases.
| | 01:14 | I am going to see what happens if I
bring this down to 2 and I am also going
| | 01:20 | to just clone this rendered frame window,
so we will have something to compare it to.
| | 01:25 | This is Max Reflection set to 4, which
is the default, and now I am going to
| | 01:29 | render it with Max Reflection set to 2.
| | 01:35 | And you will see it looks very, very similar.
| | 01:38 | There is one little black spot here,
one little fly in the ointment.
| | 01:41 | But you know what? Our
viewers might not even notice that.
| | 01:45 | So it might be okay, we might
be able to get away with this.
| | 01:47 | So a ray strikes a surface, bounces
once, bounces twice, the end and that's
| | 01:54 | going to be much faster
rendered than 4 reflections over here.
| | 01:59 | So a value of 2 might be good enough.
| | 02:02 | Now if I bring this down even further,
let's say I bring it down to 1 and render
| | 02:07 | again, we are going to see a very
obvious change here, big black spots.
| | 02:12 | So that's a symptom of the Trace Depth
being set too low or the number of Max
| | 02:18 | Reflections being set too low in this case.
| | 02:21 | So I recommend that the Max Reflections
should be set to 2 or the default is 4.
| | 02:26 | We also have here Refractions that has
to do with transparent objects and light
| | 02:31 | bending through surfaces.
| | 02:34 | Usually, you can set
this a little bit lower too.
| | 02:36 | I often set it to 4 and
that's usually good enough.
| | 02:39 | Now there is one other thing I want to
show you which is in the Render Setup window.
| | 02:44 | I can access that Render Setup
window just by clicking on this shortcut
| | 02:48 | button here and in the Renderer tab if I
scroll down, you will see the same values here.
| | 02:59 | Max Reflections and Max
| | 03:00 | Refractions, but you will
also see Max Trace Depth.
| | 03:05 | That's a limit on the total number of
rays for both Reflections and Refractions.
| | 03:11 | So your rule of thumb here
is that the Max Trace Depth
| | 03:14 | should be equal to the number
of Max Reflections plus the number of
| | 03:19 | Max Refractions and what we have
here is just about optimized for the
| | 03:23 | particular scene that we have.
| | 03:25 | So now that you understand how
Trace Depth works and the number of Max
| | 03:29 | Reflections and Refractions work,
then you will be able to tune these
| | 03:33 | settings to get faster render times and
not have to wait as long and get good results.
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| Applying a raytrace reflection map to a standard material| 00:00 | Now that you have got a basic
understanding of how ray tracing works and how to
| | 00:03 | optimize it, we can get some
practical experience in building materials.
| | 00:08 | So first thing we will start
with is a standard chrome mirror
| | 00:12 | reflective material.
| | 00:14 | And if you've used 3ds Max in the past
with the Default Scanline Renderer, this
| | 00:17 | should be pretty familiar to you,
because this is the same workflow.
| | 00:20 | In fact, all the materials that you
have built is 3ds Max will translate
| | 00:25 | seamlessly over into mental ray and
you will not have to do very much if any
| | 00:30 | tweaking in order to get it to look good.
| | 00:32 | So all your old materials will
still apply just fine in mental ray.
| | 00:35 | So I will go ahead and open the Material
Editor or press M on the keyboard and
| | 00:41 | I will start by creating ray
trace reflection material.
| | 00:45 | So I will go and give it a name raytrace
reflect, press Enter and scrolling down
| | 00:52 | I am looking for my Maps rollout and if
I open that, I see all my Map channels
| | 00:58 | and here is the Reflection channel.
| | 00:59 | I will click where it says None to
add a new map and we will get the
| | 01:05 | Material/Map Browser up.
| | 01:06 | Now since I have mental ray as my
current production renderer, I see all these
| | 01:11 | new and interesting maps available to me.
| | 01:14 | So anything that's a yellow
parallelogram is a mental ray only map.
| | 01:20 | So it will only work if mental ray is active.
| | 01:23 | The green once are standard 3ds Max
Maps and they will usually also work just
| | 01:28 | fine with mental ray.
| | 01:29 | So I am going to scroll down.
I am looking for the Raytrace Map.
| | 01:33 | Here it is, Raytrace.
| | 01:36 | Click that and click OK and now I am
looking at my Raytracer parameters in
| | 01:40 | the Material Editor.
| | 01:41 | You really want to do anything in here.
| | 01:43 | All the defaults work just fine.
| | 01:45 | It will translate over to mental ray
and everything works wonderfully. I will
| | 01:49 | turn on the background in my Material
Editor sample slot, so I can see a preview
| | 01:53 | of what this is going to look like. Good.
| | 01:55 | Let me go back up to the top level of
my material now and I will just select
| | 02:00 | my geometry in the Views, Ctrl+
Clicking on these, and assign that material to
| | 02:06 | the current selection.
| | 02:07 | Do a quick render of that and see what we get.
| | 02:17 | So with not very much effort I have got
a fairly decent looking chrome material
| | 02:21 | just by putting a Raytrace map in a
standard material, just like you would with
| | 02:26 | a Default Scanline Renderer.
| | 02:27 | Now I can improve this a little bit,
because it looks a little bit washed out.
| | 02:31 | You can see it's a bit too bright, so
I am going to go back to my Material
| | 02:34 | Editor with the M key and the trick to
this is the diffuse color is adding to
| | 02:43 | the reflection, so that's why this
is looking a little bit washed out.
| | 02:46 | So for chrome or mirrors I am going to
want to have a diffuse component that
| | 02:51 | have a very low value, maybe even 0,
take it all the way down to nothing and
| | 02:57 | see what that does.
| | 02:58 | So I am going to clone this window, so
we will have something to compare it to,
| | 03:01 | and I will click Render and now you
will see I am getting a lot better contrast
| | 03:07 | on the reflection, just by simply
reducing the diffuse component and that is how
| | 03:11 | you can use the standard materials
with the Raytrace map within mental ray to
| | 03:16 | achieve chrome and mirror reflections.
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| Applying a raytrace refraction map to a standard material| 00:00 | Now we are going to use
raytracing to produce refractions.
| | 00:05 | Refraction is the bending of light as it
moves from one transparent medium to another.
| | 00:10 | So in other words when light moves from
air into glass, it's going to bend and
| | 00:16 | we are going to achieve that with
raytracing through standard material.
| | 00:20 | So I am going to open up the
Material Editor once again.
| | 00:23 | I got a sample slot here ready.
I am going to call this one raytrace
| | 00:28 | refract, press Enter.
| | 00:32 | And just like with the reflection
channel I probably want to have black in my
| | 00:38 | diffuse components here, if I am trying to
achieve the effect of glass. So there we go.
| | 00:43 | I have got black in my Diffuse component.
| | 00:47 | Scrolling down into the Maps rollout,
opening that up and once again I can place
| | 00:51 | a raytrace map into the Refraction channel.
| | 00:54 | So it's the same map.
| | 00:57 | It knows whether I am using it
for a reflections or refractions.
| | 01:03 | Click OK. I don't really need to do
anything over here in the parameters, but
| | 01:09 | I will turn on the Background, so we can
see that the sample slot is bending light
| | 01:13 | as if it were a lens.
| | 01:18 | Maybe I will just assign it to one of
these objects and click Assign, go ahead
| | 01:25 | and do a test render of that window.
| | 01:26 | So now you can see the light is actually
bending as it travels through the cube.
| | 01:35 | That's all right, but we
can do better with this.
| | 01:37 | For one thing you might notice
the shadow here is kind of dark.
| | 01:42 | If this were made of glass, we
wouldn't have shadows that dark.
| | 01:45 | Right a solid opaque material here like
this would cast a darker shadow, but if
| | 01:51 | it were made of glass, we wouldn't
be seeing such a dark shadow here.
| | 01:54 | So what we need to do in order to get
that effect using these standard materials
| | 01:59 | is I am going to open the
Material Editor once again.
| | 02:01 | What we need to do is we just need to
reduce the opacity of the material and
| | 02:07 | this is kind of ironic, because
basically we are getting no opacity here,
| | 02:13 | because we have got a refraction map in effect.
| | 02:17 | But the shadows from the light source are
really only paying attention to the opacity.
| | 02:23 | So if I re-render this, then we will get
very, very light shadows there and they
| | 02:28 | may not even be really visible
at all with an Opacity of 10%.
| | 02:32 | So I can tweak that to whatever
value looks good for my shadows.
| | 02:38 | So now I am getting a shadow, but it's much
dimmer than the shadow of an opaque material.
| | 02:43 | Now let's say you want to do tinted
glass instead of just white glass.
| | 02:48 | Well, you can scroll down a little
bit here and what you are looking is for
| | 02:53 | actually there are two places in the Extended
Parameters here we can set the shadow color.
| | 02:58 | This is kind of unusual. What we are
doing here is we are adjusting this filter
| | 03:02 | and what that's doing is it's going to
filter the light as it passes through the object.
| | 03:07 | So if I wanted let's say a blue
tinted glass, I would set this to a fairly
| | 03:13 | saturated blue color, render that and
again that's really dealing more with the
| | 03:18 | shadows than anything.
| | 03:19 | So now I've got a blue shadow there
and then the material itself I can
| | 03:25 | adjust the color of the glass by
drilling down into the Raytrace map and
| | 03:33 | this is getting a little bit obscure, but I
got to go all the way down here into Attenuation.
| | 03:40 | What this is doing is it's
controlling whether the material is opaque or
| | 03:45 | transparent based upon
the angle toward the camera.
| | 03:49 | So if it's facing towards the camera,
it will be more transparent and if it's
| | 03:52 | facing at 90 degrees to the
camera, it will be more opaque.
| | 03:57 | This is how I will control the
color of the glass through this method.
| | 04:00 | So I am going to go down here and I
am just going to choose the Exponential
| | 04:03 | method and I am going to specify a color.
| | 04:06 | So this will give me a basic tinted glass.
| | 04:10 | This is not necessarily the best way
to do this, but this is a way to do it
| | 04:13 | that's pretty quick and easy.
| | 04:15 | So you see that's kind of blasting out.
| | 04:17 | I might need to reduce that, so I
can bring the value down and re-render.
| | 04:28 | And I am getting some tinted glass and you
notice also it's splashing light all around it.
| | 04:33 | As I mentioned before, this is not
necessarily the best way to do this, but it's
| | 04:37 | a quick and dirty way to do it and you
can repurpose your existing refractive
| | 04:43 | materials in mental ray by
just adjusting these parameters.
| | 04:47 | Later, we will look at a much more
sophisticated way of doing this in which we are
| | 04:51 | using mental rays native
shaders such as Arch and Design.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting the index of refraction| 00:00 | When working with refractive materials,
you also want to set the so-called
| | 00:04 | index of refraction.
| | 00:07 | That's how dense is the material.
| | 00:09 | So a higher index refraction will
cause light to bend more as it travels
| | 00:15 | through the object.
| | 00:18 | So, index of refraction is a property of
objects in the real world, and you will
| | 00:24 | see it here in the standard
material under Extended Parameters.
| | 00:29 | And you will see 1.5 is the default,
and that is in fact the index of
| | 00:34 | refraction of standard glass.
| | 00:37 | So let's take a look at what that looks like.
| | 00:39 | We'll open up our rendered frame window.
| | 00:41 | There it is, with an index of refraction of 1.5.
| | 00:45 | If I reduce my index of refraction
to 1, it would be the same as air.
| | 00:51 | So if I render that, we are basically
not going to get any refractions and this
| | 00:55 | is just going to look like
a sort of transparent cube.
| | 00:59 | If I set it to a value of, let's say 1.33,
that's about the same as liquid water.
| | 01:09 | If I set it to a value of 1.7, that would
correspond to a leaded glass or crystal.
| | 01:16 | So it's going to bend light even more.
| | 01:21 | And if I cranked it all the way up to
about 2.4, that would correspond to a diamond.
| | 01:27 | So it does a great deal of refraction.
| | 01:33 | And you can see it here as I preview as well.
| | 01:35 | So here it is with an IOR of 2.4.
| | 01:37 | I will clone that for comparison's sake.
| | 01:43 | Set this to 1.7 and re-render, and
that would correspond to leaded glass, and
| | 01:55 | then finally back to the default of 1.5.
| | 02:04 | Now, you don't have to be physically
accurate here and you can cheat and make
| | 02:08 | it look however you want it to look, but it's
good for you to know that these values exist.
| | 02:13 | Here we go, 1.5, 1.7, and 2.4, and
I've got a little Notepad document here.
| | 02:22 | I can open up just to give you a quick visual
on some of the most common indices of refraction.
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| Using architectural materials for raytraced reflections| 00:00 | If you've been using 3ds Max for a while,
you might have used the architectural
| | 00:05 | materials in your scenes as well.
| | 00:07 | So let's talk about how
architectural materials work with mental ray.
| | 00:12 | So I'll start by creating a new material.
| | 00:14 | I have got a blank slot here and I am
just going to click the Standard button
| | 00:18 | here to convert this to
an architectural material.
| | 00:22 | So now I have got the architectural
material in the Material Editor, and I can
| | 00:31 | go ahead and assign this to the objects.
| | 00:35 | Go ahead and Assign Material to Selection.
I might as well give it a name as well.
| | 00:39 | I'll call it architectural reflect.
| | 00:46 | So just like with standard materials,
an architectural material is more or less
| | 00:50 | seemly translated into mental ray.
| | 00:52 | It's a simpler interface than the
standard materials as you can see here.
| | 00:57 | But pretty much most of the
same principles will apply.
| | 01:01 | You will notice, for
example, the simplicity here.
| | 01:04 | There's only one parameter here for
Shininess, and I can turn that up and
| | 01:09 | that's affecting both the reflection and the
specular highlights, which in a standard
| | 01:16 | material they are dealt with separately.
| | 01:17 | Turn-on the Background here, so we can see this.
| | 01:21 | I've got Shininess and I
can turn that up or down.
| | 01:23 | You'll notice that I don't get a very
strong reflection here, and that's kind of
| | 01:30 | defies intuition because you think, oh,
| | 01:33 | if I turn the Shininess up all the way,
and that's controlling my specular
| | 01:38 | highlights and my mirror reflections,
then I should see a chrome ball here.
| | 01:43 | The reason this is not happening is
because that architectural materials are
| | 01:48 | sort of build such that you are
expected to use the templates.
| | 01:52 | So in fact, if you are using an
architectural material to do reflections
| | 01:56 | or really for anything, you are
supposed to start from one of these
| | 02:00 | existing templates.
| | 02:01 | So if I wanted to do a mirror here,
I would want to choose Mirror.
| | 02:06 | Now I have got a mirror reflection.
| | 02:08 | And you notice nothing changed in the
parameters here, which is strange but true.
| | 02:14 | So this is the big bugaboo
around architectural materials.
| | 02:18 | It's that you can play around with
these parameters all day long and they may
| | 02:22 | not do which you expect, because
you've got some other template loaded.
| | 02:26 | Some of these templates have
raytracing completely disabled.
| | 02:30 | For example, if I went and choose Fabric
and then try to increase the Shininess,
| | 02:35 | it doesn't matter what I do.
| | 02:36 | It's never going to enable raytracing.
| | 02:39 | And in fact, there is no indication
anywhere in the interface whether or not
| | 02:44 | raytracing is on or off.
| | 02:46 | So you are kind of on your own with this.
| | 02:49 | So again start from a template that's
similar to what you are trying to achieve.
| | 02:55 | So if I want to do a mirror reflection,
I would choose Mirror and maybe play
| | 03:01 | around with some of the attributes, but
that's kind of the way it's designed to work.
| | 03:06 | Go ahead and click Render.
| | 03:07 | So I have got a mirror reflection there,
and the irony of this is that it works
| | 03:13 | opposite to the standard materials.
| | 03:15 | Remember with standard materials, if I
wanted to do a really bright reflection,
| | 03:19 | I needed a diffuse color of black.
| | 03:21 | Well here, it's bizarrely the exact opposite.
| | 03:25 | If I want a strong reflection, I am going to
need to increase the Diffuse Color to white.
| | 03:30 | That's just the way it is.
| | 03:33 | Now I want to warn you.
| | 03:36 | You don't want to use the
architectural materials for refractive materials.
| | 03:41 | In other words, a glass or a crystal.
| | 03:43 | It just doesn't very well and in that
case, you are going to want to use the
| | 03:47 | mental ray native shaders, which we'll
look at a lit bit later, specifically the
| | 03:51 | Arch and Design and Pro Materials shaders.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. TransparencyModeling thin, transparent objects such as window glass| 00:01 | If you are working in architectural
scenes, you are going to want to pay
| | 00:04 | special attention to the window glazing
or the actual glass because mental ray
| | 00:10 | expects and prefers that your window glass be
single panes rather than have some thickness.
| | 00:16 | And this is because we don't want to
calculate refractions on glazing because
| | 00:20 | it's just we are never going to see the
difference between a refractive piece of
| | 00:24 | window glass and a non-refractive window glass.
| | 00:27 | So that means that you need to model the
glazing as just a flat plane with no thickness.
| | 00:33 | Now the default 3ds Max procedural
windows have thickness to the glazing.
| | 00:39 | So if you do use those procedural
windows, you'll need to edit them so that
| | 00:42 | you'll get perfectly thin
geometry. So here we go.
| | 00:46 | I am just going to Create > Geometry >
Windows, I am going to make a sliding
| | 00:52 | window real quick here.
| | 00:53 | I'll draw that out.
| | 00:54 | That's the length, the depth, and then the
height, and then right-click to complete that.
| | 01:00 | I will hit F4 so we can see edge faces,
and these procedural windows are pretty
| | 01:07 | great because for example, I can go to
my Modify panel and do things like adjust
| | 01:12 | the height, and how open
or closed it is, and so on.
| | 01:18 | That's pretty wonderful, except that
in mental ray, we are going to have
| | 01:21 | problems with the glazing here because it's
got actual thickness and you can see it here.
| | 01:25 | It says Thickness of a-quarter-of-an-inch.
| | 01:28 | Well, quarter-inch thick glass is not
really going to refract very much and it'd
| | 01:31 | be a waste of CPU cycles to calculate that.
| | 01:34 | In other words, it's just going to slow
down the rendering and we won't see any
| | 01:37 | difference on the screen.
| | 01:38 | So if you are working with these
procedural windows, you are going to want to
| | 01:42 | delete the glazing and
replace it with just flat planes.
| | 01:46 | So I am going to right-click on here
and I am going to convert this object to
| | 01:51 | Editable Poly, so that then
I can play around with it.
| | 01:54 | I am going to hit Alt+W. That's the
shortcut to make the window larger.
| | 02:00 | And if I go into Element mode, I can
select different portions of the model.
| | 02:09 | I can hit F3 to look at this in pure
wireframe, and as you can see the glazing
| | 02:15 | actually has some thicknesses,
thickness of a-quarter-inch. So that's no good.
| | 02:20 | So all you really need to do
here is just delete one side of it.
| | 02:24 | So I can go into Polygon mode, select
that one polygon, and just press Delete
| | 02:30 | and that's good enough.
| | 02:31 | I'd need to do the same for
the bottom windowpane as well.
| | 02:34 | Select that polygon and press Delete.
| | 02:36 | And now that's no longer two pieces of geometry.
| | 02:40 | There is no longer two
polygons there. It's just one.
| | 02:42 | I didn't bother deleting the little
rim around here but that's not going to
| | 02:46 | contribute in the
rendering, so it doesn't matter.
| | 02:49 | The only problem with doing it this
way is that I can't change the procedural
| | 02:54 | parameters like whether the
window is opened or closed.
| | 02:57 | There are other fancier ways you can
do that through the modifier stack, but
| | 03:00 | this is good enough for now to get you started.
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| Disabling shadows| 00:00 | Once again when working with
architectural scenes with window glazing, you are
| | 00:05 | going to want to do a couple of optimizations
here so that your renders will go more quickly.
| | 00:11 | For example, you probably are not
going to want the glazing to cast shadows.
| | 00:14 | They are simple pieces of glass and they are
not going to cast a shadow onto the ground.
| | 00:19 | If I do a quick render of what we here
though, you will see that by default even
| | 00:25 | though the glazing is almost completely
transparent here, we are seeing a shadow
| | 00:31 | being cast on the ground.
| | 00:33 | So how are we going to deal with that?
| | 00:34 | Well, there is a couple of different
ways. I could go into the Light and
| | 00:37 | exclude the object, but it's easier
actually to just go into the Object
| | 00:42 | Properties and tell it to not cast
shadows and that will work for all of the
| | 00:47 | scene lights, all at once.
| | 00:48 | So if you have ten lights in your
scene and they are all striking a piece of glass,
| | 00:52 | you can say I don't want that piece of
glass to cast shadows at all from any lights.
| | 00:59 | So just simply select whatever object,
right-click and go into the Object
| | 01:04 | Properties and right here, you will see
Cast and Receive Shadows and this is a
| | 01:10 | global setting for all of your lights.
| | 01:12 | So I might say I wanted to
receive shadows but not cast shadows.
| | 01:17 | Well, for glazing, probably you
don't want it to cast or receive shadows.
| | 01:21 | Click OK and then do another rendering
and you will see that the window is not
| | 01:25 | casting any shadow at all.
| | 01:26 | Now, of course, you will see that the
window frame is not casting a shadow either.
| | 01:31 | So in this case what I probably want
to do is create a separate object for
| | 01:36 | the glazing and tell that to not cast
shadows and the frame to continue to cast shadows.
| | 01:43 | Any way you slice it, you just need
to make sure that window glazing is
| | 01:48 | not casting or receiving shadows and that
way, your renders will go much more quickly.
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| Setting simple transparency| 00:00 | Let's get some practical experience
in adjusting parameters for window
| | 00:04 | glazing in a real scene.
| | 00:06 | So we have here is a simple scene with a
window and a camera facing out the window.
| | 00:12 | So we are looking through the camera lens here.
| | 00:14 | You will also notice there is a light
behind the camera and that's so that we
| | 00:17 | will be able to visualize some of the
problems that will occur when you are
| | 00:20 | using standard materials.
| | 00:22 | So currently I have got a black
opaque material on the window glazing.
| | 00:27 | So let's go ahead and open up the Material
Editor, take a look at that. Here it is.
| | 00:32 | Glazing simple, and it just got a
Diffuse of black and Opacity of 100
| | 00:37 | or completely opaque.
| | 00:39 | Let's do a quick render of that so that we
can see just a reality check. There we go.
| | 00:43 | We have got black and no transparency.
| | 00:49 | Okay, so if we reduce the opacity,
we will start to see through the
| | 00:53 | window, obvious enough.
| | 00:57 | With an Opacity of 60% and a Diffuse
color of black, we are starting to get sort
| | 01:01 | of a tinted window effect.
| | 01:03 | Usually, however, you don't want to
have black because most of us don't
| | 01:06 | have tinted windows.
| | 01:08 | So usually you will set this to
probably a neutral gray and when you do that,
| | 01:12 | you will probably get a
little bit too much haze.
| | 01:15 | So you probably want to reduce
the opacity down to somewhere in the
| | 01:19 | neighborhood of maybe 5-20%.
| | 01:21 | Let's try 20 and do
another quick render on that.
| | 01:28 | Okay, so far so good.
| | 01:29 | So this all makes pretty much sense
and there are no counterintuitive results here,
| | 01:33 | until you start to play
around with the Specular Level.
| | 01:37 | Let's say you want to get some
highlights on here, some glare on your windows.
| | 01:42 | So, you would think that all you have
to do is increase the Specular Level and
| | 01:46 | you get a nice hot spot on there.
| | 01:48 | Go ahead and render that and bizarrely
enough, instead of getting a hot spot,
| | 01:53 | suddenly now we have got no transparency at all.
| | 01:57 | Okay, well that's kind of strange but
that's the way it is sometimes with mental ray.
| | 02:02 | Well, there is always a workaround.
| | 02:04 | The answer here is I don't want
to have a Specular Level at all.
| | 02:07 | I just want to have 0 Specular highlights.
| | 02:10 | And to get that glare on there,
I will use a Reflection Map instead.
| | 02:14 | So I will go down to my Maps channels >
Reflection and I will drop a Raytrace map in there.
| | 02:19 | Here we go, Raytrace, just
as we did before. Go back up.
| | 02:25 | I probably don't want to have a
reflection amount of 100 because that will be a
| | 02:30 | very strong highlight that's
going to kind of overtake everything.
| | 02:35 | So my Reflection Map is
just blasting out the window.
| | 02:38 | So I want to bring that down
to something reasonable as well.
| | 02:44 | So this is a pretty good result
because we are getting glare, we are getting
| | 02:48 | transparency, we can adjust the
color and so on with the glazing.
| | 02:52 | We can give this a green
tint or whatever we wish.
| | 02:56 | And it pretty much plays well with mental ray.
| | 02:59 | I can reduce that reflection a little bit more.
| | 03:02 | I can maybe reduce the opacity a little bit
more so it will be a little bit more believable.
| | 03:06 | So that's a pretty good result for
just a standard material and you will see
| | 03:11 | that it renders fairly quickly.
| | 03:13 | Now let's talk a little bit
about Architectural materials.
| | 03:16 | Now you would think that Architectural
materials would be better suited to an
| | 03:20 | architectural application such as this,
but that's not necessarily the case.
| | 03:24 | It will give you decent results, but
the problem is you are not really going to
| | 03:28 | be able to get reflections or
glare with an Architectural material.
| | 03:32 | So I recommend if you do need to see
that glare on there that you do it this way
| | 03:37 | through the Standard materials or as we
will see later, we can also do it with
| | 03:40 | the mental ray native
shaders such as Arch and Design.
| | 03:43 | But right now I am going to go and
convert this glazing simple to an
| | 03:48 | Architectural material to show you that path.
| | 03:52 | So I will go ahead and click OK.
| | 03:53 | Now this is an Architectural
material and as always when working with
| | 03:57 | Architectural materials, once again
you will need to start from a template.
| | 04:01 | So I will click on that and you'll see
that right up near the top, there is a
| | 04:04 | template for Glass - Clear
and that's the one I want.
| | 04:07 | I will go ahead and choose that and
I will turn on the Background in the
| | 04:12 | Material Editor so I can see this
better and you will see what we are getting
| | 04:15 | here is a refractive glass.
| | 04:18 | That's not what we want.
| | 04:19 | We want to have just a flat
plane, with no refractions.
| | 04:22 | So let's play around with
these parameters a little bit here.
| | 04:25 | First of all, the Diffuse Color just
like with reflections, we probably want to
| | 04:31 | have a bright diffuse color.
| | 04:32 | So I am going to crank this up to
white or nearly white and second of all,
| | 04:39 | we can play around with the
transparency. This is currently set to 100%.
| | 04:42 | If we want to see a little bit of haze
in there, then we probably want to bring
| | 04:47 | this down to something in the
neighborhood of 90-95% so you can see it blocking
| | 04:53 | the light a little bit as
I decrease the transparency.
| | 04:56 | And then finally, the Index of
Refraction, what we want to do here is just
| | 05:00 | completely disable refractions.
| | 05:03 | So, the way to do that is to set the
refraction value to 1 and now we have got a
| | 05:09 | decent glass material
using the Architectural shader.
| | 05:14 | So I will click Render and of course,
we would go back and play with some of
| | 05:18 | these parameters a little bit
to get exactly what we want.
| | 05:20 | The thing to remember is that the
architectural material doesn't work very well
| | 05:25 | for achieving the glare that you would
see on a piece of glazing as we saw a
| | 05:30 | moment away with the standard material.
| | 05:33 | You think that if you play around with
the shininess that you would be able to
| | 05:36 | get some glare on that, but
it just doesn't work very well.
| | 05:39 | So my advice is if you want to see
reflections on the window, you are going to
| | 05:43 | want to use either a standard material
or a mental ray native material such as
| | 05:48 | Arch and Design or ProMaterials.
| | 05:51 | Now those mental ray
materials do take longer to render.
| | 05:54 | So you probably best off of all the
choices using the method I showed you
| | 05:59 | a moment ago with a standard material, a
Reflection Map, and no specular highlights.
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|
|
5. MaterialsUnderstanding the pros and cons of mental ray materials| 00:00 | Now we have taken the standard and
architectural materials about as far as they
| | 00:04 | can go in mental ray.
| | 00:05 | If we want to get the advanced effects
that mental ray can give us, we need to
| | 00:09 | use the mental ray native materials,
in other words, the materials that were
| | 00:14 | designed by mental images,
the company that makes mental ray.
| | 00:18 | We are back to our Cornell Box here and
we want to talk a little bit about sort
| | 00:22 | of high-level concepts around mental ray.
| | 00:25 | The thing you need to know about
mental ray is that it is a huge complex
| | 00:29 | programming language in itself and only
parts of that are exposed within the 3ds
| | 00:35 | Max interface, for example,
in the Material Editor.
| | 00:38 | So if I go to the Material Editor, I
can assign a mental ray specific material
| | 00:44 | by clicking to Get Material button and
in our Material Map browser, you will see
| | 00:49 | there are bunch of mental ray specific
materials indicated by yellow sphere.
| | 00:55 | So just as we saw before with the Maps,
where we saw a yellow parallelogram.
| | 01:01 | That was a mental ray map, and these are
mental ray materials and they will only work
| | 01:07 | if mental ray is enabled.
| | 01:10 | So the big daddy of these is
the Arch and Design material.
| | 01:13 | So we are going to take a
pretty good look at that.
| | 01:15 | I am going to go ahead and double
click that to assign the Arch and Design
| | 01:19 | material to my current slot.
| | 01:20 | We are going to look at this in great detail.
| | 01:23 | For now, I am just going to drag-and-
drop it just with a default gray, so we can
| | 01:29 | see if that is working.
| | 01:31 | Okay, so I am going to assign
that to these three objects.
| | 01:34 | I will go ahead and render the view and
we have got a mental ray material on there.
| | 01:40 | It's an Arch and Design material and
you will see it has got some reflections
| | 01:44 | built-in and we can see that
here in the sample as well.
| | 01:48 | So far so good, but the thing you need
to really keep in mind with this is if
| | 01:51 | you do use these mental ray materials or
mental ray shaders, they will only work
| | 01:57 | if you have mental ray enabled.
| | 01:59 | So by way of illustration, I am
going to go back into the Render Setup
| | 02:04 | and disable mental ray.
| | 02:06 | I will go to the Common tab and scroll down.
| | 02:09 | I am looking to Assign Renderer
once again and set it back to the
| | 02:15 | default Scanline Renderer.
| | 02:17 | Just to show you that if I try to render
this scene with mental ray materials on
| | 02:23 | these objects, they won't render.
| | 02:25 | So I am just going to clone
that off so we can see this.
| | 02:27 | There you go, I have turned off mental
ray and now Final Gather is not working,
| | 02:32 | so we are getting no bounce light.
| | 02:35 | And additionally, we are
getting black on our materials.
| | 02:40 | So once you use a mental ray material,
you will never going to be able to go
| | 02:44 | back to the standard Scanline Renderer.
| | 02:47 | So you have to stick with mental ray throughout.
| | 02:51 | However, you are going to want to do
that because mental ray materials give you
| | 02:54 | much better results in general.
| | 02:56 | It gives you more control and better
realism than the standard materials or the
| | 03:01 | zrchitectural materials for that matter.
| | 03:03 | However, you must also keep in mind that
mental ray is considerably slower to render.
| | 03:10 | Things aren't so bad nowadays
because computers are getting so fast.
| | 03:14 | But just be aware that your render
times with mental ray materials are going to
| | 03:17 | be significantly slower, but it's
just probably worth the wait because they
| | 03:20 | are going to look a lot better.
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| Getting familiar with the Arch & Design material| 00:00 | Let's get familiar with the Arch &
Design material and see what kind of tricks
| | 00:04 | that we can make it do.
| | 00:06 | Arch & Design is a monolithic shader or
material that includes many parameters
| | 00:13 | to do almost anything you could possibly want.
| | 00:16 | There's only a couple of exceptions.
For example, human skin is not really well
| | 00:20 | served by Arch & Design but pretty much
almost everything else you want you can do
| | 00:25 | and it's all right here at your fingertips.
| | 00:28 | So, let's take a look.
| | 00:30 | You'll notice right away in an Arch &
Design material that the interface and
| | 00:35 | the terminology differs from what
you've used with the standard and
| | 00:39 | architectural materials.
| | 00:41 | So with there are many additional parameters
as well as just different names for things,
| | 00:47 | or different organizations to things.
| | 00:49 | Let's go back up here.
| | 00:50 | You'll see that there are templates
here but the templates are optional.
| | 00:53 | It's not like with the architectural
material where you really you have to
| | 00:58 | start with a template.
| | 01:00 | Here you can use templates or not and it's fine.
| | 01:04 | You'll see at the top you've got Matte
Finish, Pearl Finish, and Glossy and so on.
| | 01:09 | We'll take a closer look at those
templates in the next video and for now we're
| | 01:13 | just going to look at the Main material
parameters that you want to get familiar
| | 01:18 | with right off the bat.
| | 01:19 | So, first of all, we've got parameters
here such as the color of your material.
| | 01:25 | That's pretty obvious.
| | 01:26 | You could choose some interesting color.
| | 01:30 | You'll also note that there is Diffuse
Level here and that's kind of helpful
| | 01:35 | because you can actually reduce
the strength of your material.
| | 01:39 | Just knock that down a little bit.
| | 01:41 | So that'll help to avoid some over-
saturated colors, which seem to be a symptom
| | 01:47 | of lot of 3ds Max renderings.
| | 01:50 | Scrolling down a little bit here,
you'll see the section for Reflection and
| | 01:55 | we can control Reflectivity
with this single slider here.
| | 01:58 | Let's turn on the Background so we can see this.
| | 02:01 | So we can control the amount of
Reflectivity and that's controlling both the
| | 02:06 | specular highlights and the
Raytrace reflections all in one.
| | 02:10 | Glossiness interacts with that in order
to produce different levels of highlights.
| | 02:17 | The Glossy Samples down here
control the quality of these highlights.
| | 02:22 | We'll talk more in detail
about all of these later.
| | 02:24 | So, we've got Refraction, Transparency.
| | 02:27 | So, if we increase the Transparency,
Refractions will sort of happen for free.
| | 02:33 | It just sort of appears.
| | 02:34 | I am going to send this back
to a Transparency of 0, okay.
| | 02:40 | And scrolling down a little bit more,
you'll see way down near the bottom
| | 02:44 | there's is a section that says General
Maps and I'm not sure why this is down
| | 02:48 | here at the bottom because
they are kind of important.
| | 02:51 | This is where you got your Color
Map and Reflection Map and so on.
| | 02:56 | So this is where you'll find them and
then additionally there's another rollout
| | 02:59 | here called Special Purpose Maps and
again I'm not quite sure why they are
| | 03:05 | called Special Purpose because, for
example, you've got Bump Map channel here
| | 03:09 | and that's a very common map.
| | 03:11 | It's not special at all.
| | 03:12 | It's something you'd use on a daily basis.
| | 03:15 | And then finally I want to point out
another very important rollout which is
| | 03:19 | the Advanced Rendering Options and
this is where you'll find controls for
| | 03:25 | things like tinted glass and so on and
again we'll look at these in more detail
| | 03:29 | in the following videos.
| | 03:31 | So, that's a big overview of the Arch & Design.
| | 03:34 | Its very deep and there's many, many
things in here to tweak but the main
| | 03:38 | ones you want to pay attention to for
now are the Main material parameters,
| | 03:42 | the General Maps, the Special Purpose Maps,
and finally these Advanced Rendering Options.
| | 03:50 | Those are sort of the high
points of the Arch & Design Material.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Learning from the Arch & Design templates| 00:00 | Let's take a deeper look at the Arch &
Design templates and learn from them and
| | 00:04 | we need to look at this also because
there are some bug-a-boos that can come up here,
| | 00:09 | some issues that may arise through
the use of the Arch & Design templates.
| | 00:15 | So, here we go, we've got Arch &
Design templates and there's lots to choose from.
| | 00:21 | For example, we've got these
Glossy Finish templates and so on and you
| | 00:26 | note that changing a template does not
necessarily change all the parameters.
| | 00:31 | So, for example when I choose Matte
Finish or Glossy Finish, it doesn't
| | 00:35 | change the diffuse color.
| | 00:36 | So that's not affected by the template.
| | 00:39 | So the templates are not universal and
they don't affect every single parameter.
| | 00:43 | Another thing to keep in mind is that
the templates are a starting point and
| | 00:46 | not an ending point.
| | 00:48 | You don't just grab a template and then drop
that into your scene and think you're done.
| | 00:52 | You start from a template and then you
tweak it and adjust it and make it your own.
| | 00:56 | You certainly don't want your work to
look like everyone else's. So, you can
| | 00:59 | learn a lot from these, just
selecting them and seeing what happens in the
| | 01:05 | Material Editor, observing the parameters.
| | 01:08 | So, for example, if I choose Glazed Ceramic,
| | 01:11 | you know that the Glazed Ceramic
template did change the diffuse color.
| | 01:15 | Okay, and I will render that. See what we get.
| | 01:19 | Okay, that's fine or I can try
different one like Leather and render that.
| | 01:27 | We're getting a brown leather and
here's where we want to take a critical look
| | 01:34 | at this, not just from an artistic
perspective but from a purely technical point
| | 01:38 | of view because some of these templates
are going to have maps built into them.
| | 01:43 | In this case, we've got a diffuse map.
| | 01:45 | I can tell because there's this
little M next to this color swatch and that
| | 01:49 | means there's a diffuse map in this material.
| | 01:52 | So, I'm going to scroll down to the
bottom and open up my General Maps to take
| | 01:56 | a look at what's there.
| | 01:57 | The Diffuse Color is a
Noise Map and that's fine.
| | 02:00 | I'm not going to have any problems with this.
| | 02:02 | I didn't any error or anything when I
tried to render because this Noise Map
| | 02:07 | is a procedural map.
| | 02:09 | It's internally generated by 3ds Max
at render time and it's not making any
| | 02:14 | external reference to any file on my hard drive.
| | 02:17 | So, there's no image that is
trying to load up and then apply.
| | 02:20 | It is just creating it
within 3ds Max, and that's fine.
| | 02:24 | However, some of these templates,
unfortunately, do reference external bitmap
| | 02:30 | files that are on your hard drive.
| | 02:33 | However, this is fraught
with all kinds of problems.
| | 02:36 | The files might not be in the expected
location or you might have upgraded the
| | 02:41 | software to a new version and
the files may have been changed.
| | 02:46 | Autodesk periodically updates the library of
bitmaps and they may not be there any more.
| | 02:51 | So, this could be dangerous if you
just grab a template and then run with it.
| | 02:57 | As you see here, I'm getting an error
message and this is the problem that you may have.
| | 03:00 | Because again this JPEG file
is not in my current project.
| | 03:05 | It's in the 3ds Max Program files
directory and it is just not be found currently.
| | 03:11 | So, let that be a warning to you.
| | 03:14 | If I try to this render this,
it's not going to find this lovely beech
| | 03:18 | colored map and how do I work around this?
| | 03:21 | Well the simple fact is I want to
investigate every single map in the
| | 03:26 | template and make sure that none of it is
referencing a file that's not in my project folder.
| | 03:34 | So, I'll have to re-build this template.
| | 03:36 | I'm not going to go through that process
now because I think you know how to do that.
| | 03:41 | I would just wipe these out and replace
them with my own bitmaps from my Project
| | 03:46 | folder and that will kill
two birds with one stone.
| | 03:49 | Number one, my work won't look like
everyone else's and number two, we won't run
| | 03:54 | into any issues with links because
we've managed all of that manually.
| | 03:59 | So, again the templates are a good
place to start but you need to kind of drill
| | 04:04 | into them and investigate to see if
they're referencing files in the 3ds Max
| | 04:08 | Program directory and if you see any
bitmap files in a template, basically
| | 04:14 | it means you've got to wipe them
out and replace them with your own.
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| Working with diffuse color and diffuse level| 00:00 | Let's get into the nitty-gritty of the
Arch & Design material and play around
| | 00:05 | with some of the parameters on a deeper level.
| | 00:08 | So first up, we've got the Diffuse Color.
| | 00:10 | So the Diffuse Color is the main color
of a material that's used to calculate,
| | 00:16 | for example, what color it's going to be
outside of its shininess or reflectivity
| | 00:22 | and also how is it
reflecting light on to other surfaces.
| | 00:25 | So Diffuse Color is the most
important color of any material.
| | 00:30 | So I can drop a color in there,
change that to something kind of reddish,
| | 00:36 | pinkish color, okay and you'll see
I am still getting a highlight there.
| | 00:44 | I can get rid of the highlight just by
simply going up to Matte Finish in my templates.
| | 00:50 | Remember that those top templates at
the very top do not change the colors.
| | 00:54 | They just change the reflectivity and
refraction properties of the material. Okay.
| | 01:00 | So I've have got a Diffuse Color here
now and it's appearing here in my View and
| | 01:06 | if I render this now, you'll see
we're getting a kind of hot material,
| | 01:11 | one that's a little bit may be over-saturated.
| | 01:14 | So the danger is when you're working in
3DS Max that you can crank these colors
| | 01:19 | up to impossible saturation.
| | 01:21 | This is a color that doesn't really exist in
nature or very rarely would exist in nature.
| | 01:27 | So generally speaking, you might
want to knock that down a little bit.
| | 01:31 | One way to do that is to
simply reduce the Diffuse Level.
| | 01:37 | It's a bit of subtle effect, so I
might want to bring this down a little bit
| | 01:40 | further so you can kind of see it.
| | 01:42 | So it's just making it less saturated and
little bit duller, so it's not quite so insane.
| | 01:47 | Of course, I can do that by changing the
color swatch directly, but this is kind
| | 01:52 | of like an insurance policy, safety
factor, so that no matter what I do here I
| | 01:56 | can make it too over-saturated, okay.
| | 02:00 | And the other parameter that I want to
point out to you in the Diffuse section
| | 02:04 | here is the Roughness and this is very
useful for achieving unfinished looks.
| | 02:10 | So if you're dealing with unfinished
wood or terracotta or other very rough
| | 02:15 | surfaces you can increase the
roughness factor and it's going to behave as if
| | 02:20 | they were micro-fine granules, not look
like a bump map because that's a visible pattern,
| | 02:26 | but this is just a sort of over
all roughness to the surface rather than
| | 02:32 | a specific bump or a normal map.
| | 02:35 | So if we render this, now we can
start to get the effect of terracotta or
| | 02:41 | unfinished ceramics.
| | 02:42 | The effect does tend to lend
itself best of curve surfaces.
| | 02:46 | You can see on this cone that we're
getting a nice kind of soft look there.
| | 02:50 | With rectilinear or flat surfaces,
we don't see that much effect to the
| | 02:56 | Roughness parameter.
| | 02:58 | So those are some basic simple things
you can do with a diffuse section of the
| | 03:02 | Arch & Design material.
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| Setting reflectivity and glossiness| 00:00 | If you want to get really good, high
quality reflective materials, then Arch and
| | 00:05 | Design is your friend, because it will
give you excellent photo-real results.
| | 00:11 | So let's take a look at controlling the
reflectivity of an Arch and Design material.
| | 00:16 | So that we can see it better, I am going
to turn on Background in my sample slot
| | 00:22 | and I'm going to adjust the Diffuse
Level to some other color other than gray,
| | 00:26 | so we can get a better
sense of what's going on here.
| | 00:29 | So the Diffuse Color is now no longer
gray and this is the satin finish which we
| | 00:34 | have a Reflectivity about 0.75 here.
| | 00:37 | The Reflectivity varies from 0 to 1.
Obviously with a Reflectivity of 0, we'll
| | 00:43 | get no reflections. With a Reflectivity
of 1 we'll get very strong reflections,
| | 00:48 | and that's going to interact with
the Diffuse Level, as you'll see here.
| | 00:53 | So I've got a Reflectivity of 1 and a
Diffuse Level of 1 and the end result is
| | 00:57 | I have a very shiny light blue material.
| | 01:00 | So let's do a render of that, see what we get.
| | 01:03 | Pretty nice, good and we can
play with this a little bit more.
| | 01:07 | If we wanted to get a perfectly chrome
mirror reflection, then what we would do
| | 01:12 | is we would reduce the
Diffuse Level down to nothing.
| | 01:15 | So let's go halfway and
see what that looks like.
| | 01:18 | If I give it a Diffuse Level of
0.5 then the diffuse component is not
| | 01:23 | contributing as much to the
end result of their rendering.
| | 01:27 | So I'll do a render at Diffuse Level
of 0.5 and now it's still just as it's
| | 01:31 | reflective but the intensity of that
diffuse color is being dimmed down.
| | 01:37 | I bring it down to 0.1.
| | 01:38 | It is barely there at all. We re-render it.
| | 01:42 | It's almost nothing there.
| | 01:43 | We are almost adding a slight gray
reflective, almost like hematite looking material.
| | 01:50 | I bring this down all the way to 0
then we're going to see sort of dark gray.
| | 01:56 | Okay, we can play with this.
| | 01:58 | We could say oh, well let's give
this value of like 0.5 and then instead
| | 02:03 | of tinting this, we could send this into
halfway, so we can get a brighter reflection here.
| | 02:09 | We can also just go directly to the Templates.
| | 02:13 | There is already a template
here for Chrome, if I want that.
| | 02:16 | So I can click on that and you'll see
here now it's got a Diffuse Level of
| | 02:21 | 1 with a gray color.
| | 02:22 | Now I'm getting chrome reflections, very cool.
| | 02:29 | Now the other thing that you can do with
Arch and Design that you could never do
| | 02:32 | with the standard material
is get blurry reflections.
| | 02:36 | So if you want to have something that
looks like it was a rough finish rather
| | 02:41 | than a purely polished finish, if we
wanted to look like it was brushed aluminum
| | 02:45 | or something like that.
| | 02:46 | Then you could reduce the Glossiness here.
| | 02:49 | So Glossiness value of 1 is
going to give you mirror finishes.
| | 02:54 | Okay, if we bring this down
to let's say 0.7, let's do the
| | 02:58 | side-by-side comparison here. Render that.
| | 03:03 | Actually we're not seeing anything here
because the Glossy Samples are set to 0,
| | 03:08 | so I need to increase that value as well.
| | 03:10 | So this wants to be a
setting, which is a power of 2.
| | 03:14 | That is a number that is 2, 4, 8, 16 and so on.
| | 03:19 | So let's try value of 8,
Glossy Samples, and there we go.
| | 03:25 | We are starting to see blurry reflections.
| | 03:27 | As I decrease the Glossiness, I'll
see blurrier and blurrier reflections.
| | 03:33 | So let's compare this side-by-side
and of course, it's going to be slow.
| | 03:37 | The more of the stuff that you
pile on, the slower it's going to get.
| | 03:40 | Pretty nice there, we're
getting blurry reflections.
| | 03:43 | I'll go ahead and reduce this
Glossiness down to let's say 0.4 and you can see
| | 03:51 | it here as well. We're getting
blurry soft reflections, very nice.
| | 03:55 | Now as you decrease the Glossiness,
you're probably going to need to increase
| | 03:59 | the samples, so you get better accuracy,
because here with a Glossiness of 0.4
| | 04:04 | we're starting to see a lot of grain
and especially if this were an animation
| | 04:08 | with a moving camera or moving objects,
that grain would dance around a lot and
| | 04:12 | it would be distracting.
| | 04:13 | It would draw attention to itself.
| | 04:15 | So the samples would need to be
increased and this is where you run into a wall
| | 04:19 | with your rendering time.
| | 04:20 | So be cautious with this.
| | 04:22 | I might set this to a value of 32
and then render. This is a pretty fast
| | 04:26 | computer I am on here now, so it
shouldn't take too long but it's
| | 04:29 | definitely going to take a lot longer
than Glossy Samples of 8. It should give us
| | 04:33 | a pretty good result though.
| | 04:34 | All right so the rendering is finished.
| | 04:37 | It took actually almost a minute to
render with a Glossy Samples of 32, so let
| | 04:42 | that be a warning to you.
| | 04:44 | It's a very cool effect but it is pretty slow.
| | 04:46 | Also I want to point out to you that in
your rendered frame window you will see
| | 04:51 | a Glossy Reflections Precision slider
and this is a global multiplier that will
| | 04:56 | effect all materials in your scene.
| | 04:58 | So with a value of 1, it's not
affecting the scene at all, but if I knock this
| | 05:03 | down to 0.5 what would happen is it
would multiply this Glossy Samples value by
| | 05:10 | 0.5, globally, for all materials and
that would knock that down to 16 in this case.
| | 05:16 | I set that back to 1.
| | 05:18 | Finally, if you want to get a brush
effect, then you can put a procedural map
| | 05:23 | into the Reflection channel or the
Bump channel of your Arch and Design.
| | 05:28 | So I'll go to the Templates and I'll show you
there is one here already for Brushed Metal.
| | 05:32 | I just pick that and Glossy Sample set to 8.
| | 05:37 | It shouldn't be too long, and
we'll wait and see what we get.
| | 05:40 | So what this is doing is it's
producing the effect of micro-fine scratches on
| | 05:45 | the surface and it's looking pretty good.
| | 05:48 | It's not great but we could tweak it
by increasing our Image Precision and
| | 05:52 | our Glossy Samples.
| | 05:54 | You can see that we're getting pretty
good striations here on the cone, but
| | 05:58 | we are seeing some grained issues
here on some of these other objects.
| | 06:02 | So I would have to increase the
number of samples and/or increase the
| | 06:06 | image precision here.
| | 06:07 | But before I do that, I want to scroll
down and just show you what's happening here.
| | 06:11 | In this Reflection channel here there is
actually a map and I scroll all the way
| | 06:15 | down so we can look at that.
| | 06:17 | Reflection Color has got a Noise Map in it.
| | 06:21 | So I am actually going to drag that out to
its own sample slot, so that we can observe it.
| | 06:25 | I'll choose Instance, so that means if
I make any changes to this, it will be
| | 06:29 | reflected in the material itself.
| | 06:31 | So this is the map that's provided for
this effect, so it's a fractal noise map
| | 06:37 | that's been stretched.
| | 06:39 | You see the Tiling values that are
pretty extreme here and the colors are
| | 06:42 | just gray and white.
| | 06:44 | If I want to make those brushed
metal grooves more obvious and extreme
| | 06:49 | I might choose to reduce the value of
one of the colors and let's do just a
| | 06:55 | region render of this.
| | 06:56 | Just going to render one little part of
this so we don't have to wait too long
| | 07:00 | and I am going to increase the anti-aliasing.
| | 07:02 | And I said before, I want to also
probably increase the number of Glossy Sample.
| | 07:07 | So I'll do that just so we
get a decent result here.
| | 07:10 | Let me set that to 16, give that a shot.
| | 07:15 | So having increased the contrast of the
map I should start to see a more extreme
| | 07:21 | look to the brush on the metal here.
| | 07:24 | There are other ways to do it, as I said.
| | 07:25 | You can also use a bump map and
that's looking pretty good there.
| | 07:29 | The thing to keep in mind with this is
that it's dependent upon the U-Vs of your
| | 07:34 | objects, so they have to have good U-Vs.
| | 07:37 | That means they got to have good
texture mapping coordinates and if they don't,
| | 07:41 | then the noise is not going
to stretch across there in any kind of
| | 07:44 | decent looking way.
| | 07:45 | So that's a little bit about how to use
Reflectivity in Arch and Design to get
| | 07:50 | effects ranging from Chrome to Brushed Metal.
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| Rendering thin wall reflections| 00:00 | Previously we looked at standard
materials for creating window glazing and as
| | 00:06 | you saw that takes a
little bit of time to setup.
| | 00:08 | You can also however use mental ray
Arch and Design materials with a simple
| | 00:12 | template for window glazing and
that's pretty quick and easy to do.
| | 00:16 | Just be aware that the
rendered times might be longer.
| | 00:19 | So what we have got here is a scene,
in which we are looking into an
| | 00:23 | interior from outside.
| | 00:25 | I am going to hit F3, so
we can see the geometry.
| | 00:28 | I am going to hit F3 again just to go
back to wireframe and what we have here is
| | 00:33 | this sliding glass door has got a multi
sub-object material on it here and you
| | 00:37 | will see I have got glazing simple and
that's really very simple and very dumb.
| | 00:43 | And if I render this now, just you will see
it's just basically got half opacity.
| | 00:49 | So that's just a very simple glazing
with no reflections and what I will do now
| | 00:54 | is I will drag this off to its own
material sample slot and instance that.
| | 01:00 | So I can make changes to this and
it will be reflected in my scene.
| | 01:03 | So instead of having the simple
glazing, I am going to rename this.
| | 01:06 | I am going to call this one Glazing
Arch Design and I am going to convert the
| | 01:12 | standard material to an Arch and
Design material and it's a simple matter to
| | 01:17 | just choose a template.
| | 01:18 | Just make sure that you are choosing
the Glass Thin Geometry template because
| | 01:22 | it's optimized for thin wall glazing.
| | 01:27 | Again it's a single polygon.
| | 01:28 | There is no thickness to it.
| | 01:29 | I will turn on the background so we can see it.
| | 01:32 | So we have got reflections.
| | 01:34 | We scroll down here.
| | 01:35 | We will see the reflectivity is set to 1.
| | 01:37 | We will also see that the
transparency is set to 1, which means it's fully
| | 01:42 | transparent and fully reflective.
| | 01:44 | Also note the index of refraction here is
set to 1.5, which is accurate for glass.
| | 01:50 | However, what's happening here is it's
not actually going to refract light as it
| | 01:53 | goes through the glass.
| | 01:55 | This has more to do with how the
material is going to reflect the environment.
| | 02:01 | So I am going to do a quick test render of
that, so we can kind of see what's going on.
| | 02:07 | So right now we are getting pretty good results.
| | 02:09 | Now this is with very low quality rendering,
so it takes a little bit of time to render.
| | 02:14 | I have got that prepared already,
so we can take a look at it.
| | 02:17 | I am just going to hit Alt+Tab
and go to my pre-prepared rendering.
| | 02:21 | So that's all I had to do to get thin
wall glazing to look pretty good and it's
| | 02:25 | reflecting the environment here and we
are getting more or less accurate results
| | 02:31 | looking through into the interior inside.
| | 02:35 | Finally, if you want to control the
color of the glass then with a thin wall
| | 02:40 | template, you can do that
through this refraction color here.
| | 02:43 | So you can just choose a different
color like let's say green and then when you
| | 02:49 | render, you will have a tint to the glass.
| | 02:52 | You don't want this to be very dark.
| | 02:53 | It may look okay here but it might not
look so okay when you render it, so try
| | 02:58 | to keep this fairly unsaturated.
| | 03:00 | So that's how you use the Arch & Design
material with the thin wall reflection template.
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| Rendering solid glass| 00:00 | To achieve good results for a solid
glass, you would want to choose a different
| | 00:04 | template in mental ray Arch and Design.
| | 00:07 | The thin wall template is
really only for window glazing.
| | 00:10 | So, for example, in this scene I have
got a wine glass and I want it to both
| | 00:13 | reflect and refract its environment.
| | 00:17 | So let's take a look at this just by itself
with just a white material on it. There it is.
| | 00:25 | We have got just a standard white
material and I will go ahead and make a
| | 00:28 | new material for this.
| | 00:29 | I will call it Glass Solid.
| | 00:32 | I will convert that to an Arch and Design
material type and I will choose a template.
| | 00:39 | So you will see here we have got once
again transparent materials and we have
| | 00:44 | two to choose from here in this case.
| | 00:45 | Solid geometry or glass physical.
| | 00:49 | Now solid geometry is not "physically
accurate", but it renders more quickly and
| | 00:54 | it will usually give you good enough results.
| | 00:57 | So, if you really need something to be
absolutely physically accurate, you can
| | 01:01 | use a glass template.
| | 01:03 | Let's take a look at the
solid geometry template first.
| | 01:05 | I will turn it on in the background, so
we can see that is both reflecting and
| | 01:09 | refracting its environment.
| | 01:11 | We scroll down into the Parameters.
| | 01:13 | You will see that they are pretty much all
the same as the thin walled geometry template.
| | 01:18 | But if we scroll down further and open
up the Advanced Rendering Options rollout,
| | 01:24 | one of the things in here that you
will see is the option for either Solid
| | 01:30 | or Thin-walled glass and translucency.
| | 01:33 | So, clearly we want to have
the Solid option enabled here.
| | 01:36 | All right, so I will go ahead and
assign that to my geometry, open my rendered
| | 01:41 | frame window back up again and I just
want to render a region here. I don't want
| | 01:45 | to render the whole frame every time.
| | 01:48 | Click Render and see what we get.
| | 01:49 | So that's pretty nice for just dropping
a template in without doing any editing.
| | 01:54 | So what can we do with this to play
with it a little bit? Well, just like with
| | 01:58 | the thin-walled option, we can play
around with the color here to get different
| | 02:02 | tints and it's very, very sensitive.
| | 02:05 | You'd want it to be almost completely
white. Otherwise the tint is going to
| | 02:09 | completely sort of overtake the material.
| | 02:11 | So now I have just increase that to
almost completely white and as you will see
| | 02:15 | we are getting a cleaner result there.
| | 02:18 | If I wanted to be a crystal goblet,
I might set the index of refraction to 1.7.
| | 02:22 | It will bend the light a little bit more.
| | 02:24 | It will also pop a little bit more.
| | 02:26 | It will reflect the
environment a little bit more.
| | 02:30 | So that's the Solid Geometry option.
| | 02:32 | Okay, so let's take a look
now at the physical template.
| | 02:36 | So I will go back up and choose Glass
physical and you know right off the bat,
| | 02:42 | suddenly we are getting very strong
effect here with the tinting of the glass.
| | 02:48 | Go ahead and render that.
| | 02:50 | So interestingly, this is just
something that you will note.
| | 02:54 | You have a very strong look here but
it doesn't necessarily translate to a
| | 02:58 | really strong look over here.
| | 03:00 | So why is that happening?
| | 03:02 | Well let's scroll down here a little bit.
| | 03:04 | Notice that the transparency color
here with the physical template is
| | 03:12 | actually white, okay.
| | 03:14 | Scrolling down a little bit further into
the Advanced Rendering Options, this is
| | 03:19 | why it's looking so blue here and yet
we're not getting much blue over here.
| | 03:23 | It's because of this parameter,
the refraction max distance.
| | 03:28 | So you can think of this as being sort
of fog inside the glass and this value
| | 03:33 | here is a distance value that
indicates at what distance, in the thickness of
| | 03:39 | this solid glass, does it
reach full intensity to this color?
| | 03:45 | So that means that it has to be
2' 6'' thick in order to be this color.
| | 03:50 | So if we wanted to see a stronger tint
effect on the glass here then we would
| | 03:57 | need to reduce the max distance.
| | 03:59 | May be I will set it to something like an inch.
| | 04:01 | So, now you will see we are
getting a little bit of tinting there.
| | 04:04 | If I reduce it even further down to a
very low value like .1 inches, then we
| | 04:10 | will start to see a much
stronger effect on the tinting.
| | 04:13 | You have noticed that this color does
not really correspond to the color that
| | 04:18 | you see in your final rendering.
| | 04:21 | So the rendering will tend
to be a lot more saturated.
| | 04:23 | You can bring this even more extreme.
| | 04:29 | So don't judge by what
you see in the sample slot.
| | 04:32 | You will have to judge by what you see
in your actual final rendering and unlike
| | 04:37 | when you are working with the standard
materials, you don't have to worry about
| | 04:40 | the shadow color versus the glass color.
| | 04:43 | That all happens sort of automatically for you.
| | 04:45 | You don't have to think
about it. So there you go.
| | 04:47 | That's how you get excellent results
with solid and physical templates for
| | 04:53 | glass in Arch and Design.
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| Controlling BRDF| 00:00 | When working with transparent materials,
either glass or even just varnish on a
| | 00:05 | surface, you are going to want to pay
attention to something called BRDF and
| | 00:10 | that's an acronym for Bidirectional
Reflectance Distribution Function.
| | 00:15 | It's a bit of mouthful but what it
refers to is the falloff curve between
| | 00:21 | reflectivity and
transparency on a transparent material.
| | 00:26 | So in the example of this wine glass
in the center of the glass where the
| | 00:31 | surface is pointing directly at the
camera, we are getting a great deal of
| | 00:35 | transparency and not much reflection.
| | 00:38 | Over here on the edge of the glass,
where its surface is pointing 90
| | 00:42 | degrees away from the camera,
we are getting a lot more reflectivity and
| | 00:46 | a lot less transparency.
| | 00:48 | So BRDF controls the curve
between transparency and reflectivity.
| | 00:55 | Currently on this wine glass, I have
this simple glass solid template applied.
| | 01:00 | Scrolling down a little bit and you
will notice the index of refraction is set
| | 01:05 | to the default of 1.5.
| | 01:07 | Scrolling down a little bit further,
we have got the BRDF rollout and within
| | 01:12 | here you have two options.
| | 01:14 | You can either let 3ds Max and mental
ray handle your BRDF curve or you can
| | 01:20 | design your own custom curve.
| | 01:22 | So, if you just want it to be
calculated it for you, you can use the By IOR
| | 01:28 | option and then the BRDF curve will be
controlled by the index of refraction.
| | 01:34 | So you will see here with an IOR
of 1.5, we are getting solid glass.
| | 01:39 | If I increase the IOR to something like
2.4, which is diamond, we are going to
| | 01:44 | get a lot more reflectivity.
| | 01:46 | If I reduce the IOR to like 1.3 for
water, we will get a lot more transparency.
| | 01:51 | Okay so, we will just set
this to whatever our material is.
| | 01:56 | So let's try it at 2.4 and render
the glass and see what that does.
| | 02:00 | So this is not physically accurate
because of course, we can't model, we can't
| | 02:05 | create a glass out of pure diamond, but
it does give us more reflectivity and it
| | 02:10 | makes our image pop a little bit more.
| | 02:12 | The downside of it though is that we
are getting too much refraction because
| | 02:16 | this IOR parameter is controlling both
the bending of light and the BRDF curve.
| | 02:23 | Okay, so what we would really probably
want to do if we want to make our images
| | 02:27 | pop a little bit more and get more
reflectivity, we probably want to have the
| | 02:31 | IOR set to be physically accurate and then
adjust the BRDF curve manually. So let's try that.
| | 02:37 | So when I choose Custom Reflectivity
function then I have three parameters to play with.
| | 02:42 | The 0 degree reflection is how much
reflection we are going to have in the
| | 02:46 | centre or where the surface is pointed
directly at the camera is 0 degrees to
| | 02:52 | the line of sight of the camera.
| | 02:53 | So as I reduce this, we will see less
and less reflectivity in the centre.
| | 02:57 | The second parameter is the
reflectivity at 90 degrees which is on the edges or
| | 03:02 | where the surface is pointed away from
the camera and then the curve shape here
| | 03:07 | is, as the name indicates, the shape of
the curve and it's set to 5 by default
| | 03:12 | which is actually kind of high.
| | 03:13 | Let's see what this looks like if I set
this to 1 and I will reduce the 0 degree
| | 03:18 | reflection down to nothing and render
the glass and see what this gives us.
| | 03:23 | So this is a pretty clear
demonstration of how BRDF works.
| | 03:26 | You wouldn't really see this sort of
phenomenon in nature but this is just a
| | 03:30 | good indicator in terms of the lesson.
| | 03:32 | So you will see here in the center it's
completely transparent and at the edge
| | 03:37 | it's completely reflective.
| | 03:39 | So you'd never really do something like that.
| | 03:41 | You would play with this until you
got something that looked good and
| | 03:44 | my recommendation with this curve shape
is that default value of 5 is really way
| | 03:49 | too high and I would tend to bring
that down probably around 2 or 3.
| | 03:56 | But this is definitely a process
where you would just experiment to get the
| | 04:00 | look that you want.
| | 04:01 | So that's too reflective,
I would say throughout.
| | 04:05 | So I'll bring my 0 degree reflectivity
down and just do iterative renders until
| | 04:12 | we get the look that we want.
| | 04:14 | So now this is better than setting the
IOR really high because the light is not
| | 04:19 | bending excessively as it travels
through the glass but yet we are getting
| | 04:23 | stronger reflections and
we are getting a prettier image.
| | 04:28 | Of course again, this is not
physically accurate but it looks good.
| | 04:31 | So that's how you control
BRDF in Arch and Design.
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| Rendering translucency| 00:00 | One of the great things about Arch
and Design is the ability to achieve
| | 00:05 | translucent surfaces.
| | 00:07 | So translucency is defined as
illumination coming from behind a surface,
| | 00:14 | illuminating that surface.
| | 00:16 | So in other words, normally, when you
have light striking solid surface, light
| | 00:22 | will hit that surface and
illuminate it and then that's it.
| | 00:25 | There's nothing else going on there.
| | 00:26 | But when you have a light shining
through a surface, then you need to have that
| | 00:33 | light contribute to the
rendered color of the surface.
| | 00:37 | So that's what translucency is all about.
| | 00:39 | It's allowing us to simulate the effect
of a semi-opaque material with a backlight.
| | 00:47 | So in this example, I've got a lamp,
and currently it's got a standard arch and
| | 00:52 | design assigned to it but it's got no
reflectivity, no transparency, nothing
| | 00:58 | fancy going on just yet.
| | 00:59 | So let's do a render of that.
| | 01:01 | See what that looks like.
| | 01:03 | So here it is with no
transparency and no translucency.
| | 01:07 | Don't worry about the lighting in any of these.
| | 01:09 | We are going to talk about
how the lighting works later.
| | 01:12 | Currently, you'll see we are getting
shadows cast and all that kind of good stuff.
| | 01:16 | So if I want to see a translucent
lampshade here, then I want to play around
| | 01:22 | with the parameters in the
Refraction section of Arch and Design.
| | 01:27 | So first of all, we have straight up
transparency, and that's fairly obvious.
| | 01:31 | We've seen that with glass.
| | 01:32 | If I set the Transparency to 1 for
example, then we are going to get a
| | 01:36 | transparent material, and I've got
a color in here to make it a tinted
| | 01:41 | transparent material.
| | 01:42 | So let's render that and see what that gives us.
| | 01:45 | Suddenly now, my scene is much
brighter and we are not getting any shadows,
| | 01:49 | because that material is completely
transparent, so it's not blocking the light.
| | 01:53 | Well that's not really what we want.
We want it to be casting a shadow, and we
| | 01:57 | want it to be as if it were lit from behind,
and that's where translucency comes in.
| | 02:02 | So I can turn that on and we can
play around with these parameters here.
| | 02:06 | So the weight of the translucency
is the most important thing here.
| | 02:11 | That controls the balance between
transparency and backlight and you'll see
| | 02:16 | here I've got a value of 0.5.
| | 02:18 | That's probably a pretty good starting
value to begin with. And then you also
| | 02:22 | notice that I have got a color here
for the color of the translucency itself.
| | 02:27 | So in other words, this is the color that's
going to shine through from the other side.
| | 02:33 | So that's different from the transparency color.
| | 02:35 | Basically, this is going to have more
to do with the color of the shadows and
| | 02:38 | this is going to have more to do with the color
of the surface as rendered. Give that a shot.
| | 02:44 | So now we are seeing backlight and
we are seeing transparent shadows.
| | 02:47 | So now we can play around with the translucency.
| | 02:50 | If we want to give more emphasis to
the translucency and less emphasis to the
| | 02:55 | transparency, then we can
increase this weight value.
| | 02:58 | So I could set it to maybe 0.8,
and then do another rendering.
| | 03:04 | And that's really all there is to it.
| | 03:05 | I can play around with these
parameters to get the exact look that I want.
| | 03:08 | Of course, that's also going to be
dependent upon my lighting and exposure in my scene.
| | 03:13 | But that's how you will achieve
translucent effects with Arch and Design.
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| Using ProMaterials| 00:00 | As we have seen, mental ray Arch and
Design has many great options and a lot of
| | 00:05 | stuff to play with and it's a
monolithic shader that will do almost anything.
| | 00:08 | However, sometimes it's too much
information to have to sift through and if you
| | 00:13 | just want to get some materials applied
quickly and easily, you might opt to use
| | 00:17 | the 3ds Max ProMaterials instead.
| | 00:20 | These are mental ray shaders that are
specifically designed for a particular
| | 00:24 | type of material such as glass
or concrete or what have you.
| | 00:29 | So, let's go ahead and do that.
| | 00:30 | I am going to create a ProMaterial and
assign it to some of these objects here.
| | 00:35 | So let's start with a ProMaterial of
solid glass and see what we get with that.
| | 00:38 | I am going to call this pro glass and
convert the Standard material into a ProMaterial.
| | 00:45 | So, again each one of these ProMaterials is
specifically designed to achieve a certain effect.
| | 00:50 | So we have got Solid Glass.
| | 00:52 | I will turn on the Background so we can
see it in the sample slot and I will go
| | 00:57 | ahead and assign that to my cube.
| | 01:00 | Let's do a region render of that and see
what the Solid Glass ProMaterial looks like.
| | 01:08 | Now this particular object is actually
about 18 inches on the side and solid.
| | 01:13 | So that's a solid cube of glass.
| | 01:16 | We have got the Color (Transmittance)
here, which will determine the color of
| | 01:20 | the fog inside the glass.
| | 01:22 | So for example, I can choose
Green if I want green glass.
| | 01:26 | Click Render and now you can
see we are getting a green tint.
| | 01:30 | We can control the density of the fog
through this Reference Thickness parameter
| | 01:36 | and it's as same as the Max Distance
parameter in the Advanced Rendering Options
| | 01:41 | rollout of the Arch and Design shader.
| | 01:44 | If we set this to 3 feet then we won't
see much of an effect because it won't
| | 01:48 | reach the full density.
| | 01:50 | If I reduce the thickness to let's say
an inch, then we will see a much stronger
| | 01:58 | effect to the tint and in fact,
so strong that it's almost opaque.
| | 02:01 | You notice we are getting an interesting
effect here around the edges where it's
| | 02:05 | almost transparent there.
| | 02:06 | So we can adjust these different
values to get different effects.
| | 02:11 | Back to 6 inches there.
| | 02:12 | You can also play around with Custom Colors.
| | 02:16 | So instead of just these default colors
we can go and choose a Custom Color and
| | 02:20 | plug-in whatever we want.
| | 02:21 | So if I want to have a much more
saturated green, I can choose that.
| | 02:26 | You notice that now it is looking very,
very thick, so we might want to increase
| | 02:31 | this to let's say 18 inches to control the look.
| | 02:36 | One handy option of the ProMaterials is
that they have material parameters built
| | 02:42 | into allow you to vary the surface.
| | 02:45 | So for example, we have a Surface
Roughness and Surface Imperfections.
| | 02:49 | So we can play around with that.
| | 02:51 | What I am going to do is I am going to
get in closer so we can see this more
| | 02:54 | clearly because those Surface
Imperfections are pretty small.
| | 02:59 | So here I am going to choose, we have
Rippled, Wavy or we can put a custom
| | 03:05 | map in there as well.
| | 03:06 | Go back to my rendered frame
window and I'll do a full-view render.
| | 03:12 | So we can see with just a few mouse
clicks, we will get pretty good results with
| | 03:16 | this green glass and we have got
some surface imperfections on there too.
| | 03:21 | One thing you do want to watch out for
with these ProMaterials is some of them
| | 03:24 | do actually create links to external
bitmaps just like the Arch and Design
| | 03:29 | templates do and ironically, those
are not displayed in the interface.
| | 03:35 | In other words, the ProMaterials make
reference to bitmaps and you can't see
| | 03:39 | that that's happening in the Material Editor.
| | 03:42 | So be very cautious about that because
ProMaterials could cause you grief if you
| | 03:47 | update to a new version of 3ds Max.
| | 03:49 | Your materials might actually change.
| | 03:52 | So if you want to protect yourself
from that, stick with Arch and Design.
| | 03:56 | If you want to go fast and loose and take
your chances then play around with ProMaterials.
| | 04:01 | They are quick and easy and in most
cases, they don't use bitmaps, but in
| | 04:05 | some cases they do.
| | 04:06 | So just a warning on that one.
| | 04:09 | So that's how you use
ProMaterials with mental ray in 3ds Max.
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|
|
6. Photometrics and Exposure ControlUnderstanding photometrics| 00:00 | Now that we have learned all about
mental ray materials, we can start looking at
| | 00:04 | photometric lighting.
| | 00:05 | Here is a scene of an interior that
uses photometric lighting and I have got a
| | 00:10 | rendered image here.
| | 00:11 | Let me pull that up on the screen for you.
| | 00:13 | These images do take a while to render.
| | 00:15 | This one took about 3 minutes to
render on a fairly fast machine.
| | 00:19 | You can see it is a pretty small
image size and it took quite a while.
| | 00:23 | So be prepared for that.
| | 00:25 | In these exercises, at this stage,
I don't want to use the version here that has
| | 00:31 | all the materials because that's
going to take a lot longer to render.
| | 00:34 | So as you'll see, I am going to
open up another version of this scene
| | 00:37 | that just has a blank Light
material and we'll start from there.
| | 00:40 | But I just wanted to show this to you to
give you a little bit of a taste of the
| | 00:43 | power of photometrics.
| | 00:45 | So what are photometrics?
| | 00:47 | Well, as the name implies it's
photo meaning light and metrics
| | 00:50 | meaning measurement.
| | 00:52 | So, photometrics are a way of
measuring light sources in the real world.
| | 00:56 | Generally speaking, when working with
interior lighting, we will work with a
| | 01:01 | unit of measure called lumens because
that's what light bulbs and fixtures are
| | 01:05 | rated at, in lumens.
| | 01:07 | Once you have the photometric
information, whether it's coming from artificial
| | 01:11 | lighting source or from daylight,
that information can then be used to
| | 01:15 | calculate advanced lighting techniques in
global illumination like Raytracing and Final Gather.
| | 01:20 | This is an actually a physically
accurate simulation and because of that.=,
| | 01:24 | we can precisely represent what a
particular scene would look like given a
| | 01:30 | certain lighting scheme.
| | 01:31 | So this is very valuable to
architects and interior designers so they can
| | 01:35 | visualize exactly what it is going to
look like on a certain day, at a certain
| | 01:39 | latitude and at a certain time.
| | 01:41 | Pretty incredible stuff.
| | 01:43 | In order to do this properly
though, we have to follow some rules.
| | 01:46 | First of all, we need to have a camera
that's calibrated in some way, just like
| | 01:51 | when you take a photograph in the
real world you have to set the exposure.
| | 01:54 | So I am going to hit Alt+W and go
out to show you that I have got some
| | 02:00 | cameras in this scene.
| | 02:01 | I am going to open up my Layer
Manager and make the cameras visible.
| | 02:06 | So you can see I have got several cameras
viewing the scene from different angles.
| | 02:12 | So that's sort of a prerequisite here.
We got to have a camera and we have to
| | 02:15 | apply some kind of exposure control to
the camera or to the scene, so that way
| | 02:21 | we will bring this very large range of
possible brightness that we find in the
| | 02:25 | real world down to a narrower range
that we can represent on a screen like a TV
| | 02:30 | or a computer monitor.
| | 02:32 | So that's called exposure control.
| | 02:34 | Another thing that we have to do is
make sure that everything in the scene is
| | 02:37 | modeled to accurate real-world scale
because photometrics assume and depend upon
| | 02:43 | the fact that everything in our
scene is modeled to real-world scale.
| | 02:49 | And so I have set my scene up to feet
and inches and I've modeled all these
| | 02:52 | objects to the size that they
would really be in the real world.
| | 02:56 | So that's critical and it's not optional.
| | 02:59 | So I can't stress that
enough of how important it is.
| | 03:02 | We will talk a little bit
more about that in a moment.
| | 03:05 | One last thing to mention about
photometrics is that it's a starting point.
| | 03:11 | Once again, we can cheat, we can
push our rendering towards different
| | 03:16 | contrast, or we can cheat the color in
ways that we could not really do very
| | 03:20 | well in the real world.
| | 03:21 | It's kind of akin to if you take a
photograph of a real scene, you might bring
| | 03:25 | it into a Photoshop and adjust it so
that would print out well or display well
| | 03:31 | on a TV screen or what have you.
| | 03:33 | So the same sort of principles apply
here in 3D and we can adjust our rendering
| | 03:38 | to get "physically accurate results"
or we can adjust it to get more
| | 03:43 | impressionistic results that
satisfy some sort of artistic criteria.
| | 03:48 | So that's a little bit of an
introduction to the concepts behind photometerics.
| | 03:51 | Let's dig in and we are going to
take a look at modeling to scale.
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| Understanding the importance of modeling to scale| 00:00 | When working with photometric lighting,
once again it is critical that you model
| | 00:04 | your scene to accurate real-world scale.
| | 00:06 | That's not something that is always
necessarily done in an animation or
| | 00:11 | visual effects workflow.
| | 00:13 | So if you come from the game world or
from media and entertainment, you might
| | 00:18 | not have learned at Stage 1 to model all
of your scenes to some particular scale.
| | 00:24 | Whereas if you come from an
engineering or design background then that's
| | 00:27 | probably sort of an assumption
that we are always modeling to scale.
| | 00:30 | Well, if you haven't modeled to scale
then you are going to have problems.
| | 00:33 | Your photometrics are not
going to work correctly.
| | 00:36 | So you are going to have to fix that somehow.
| | 00:38 | Just to show that I have modeled this
scene to scale, I am going to create a box
| | 00:43 | here and I am going to create a box
here that's 1 foot on a side. Oops!
| | 00:49 | That's 1 inch.
| | 00:50 | 12 inches, 1 foot on a side.
| | 00:54 | And I usually do this just as a sanity
check to see okay, did I really build
| | 00:58 | this thing to scale?
Is that really right?
| | 01:00 | So this is kind of a trick that people
do a lot is create a box that's 1 foot on
| | 01:04 | a side or whatever amount on a side
in order to be able to see okay, is it
| | 01:09 | really, really the right size?
| | 01:10 | And in this case it is. That's fine.
| | 01:13 | Let's say that you have an issue, that you
haven't modeled your world to scale. Then what?
| | 01:18 | Well, you are going to have to rescale
your whole scene and there is good ways
| | 01:25 | and there is bad ways to do that.
| | 01:26 | I am going to delete this box.
| | 01:28 | One way that you could scale your
scene would be to select it all and put it
| | 01:31 | into a group and then scale the group.
| | 01:34 | But that's going to cause problems
because if things are linked together or if
| | 01:39 | you have constraints or if you have any
kind of fancy animation stuff going on
| | 01:42 | in there then it is probably going to
break when you scale the entire group up,
| | 01:46 | so that's not recommended.
| | 01:48 | What I do recommend that you do instead
is go up to the Utilities panel here and
| | 01:55 | you want to go into More and within
here, we have all these utilities.
| | 02:01 | You are looking for one that says
Rescale World Units and this is going to just
| | 02:06 | create a multiplier just globally on all of
your geometry and scale it all up or down.
| | 02:11 | It is more robust.
| | 02:12 | It's probably not going to break as
easily as if you would just grouped
| | 02:15 | everything and scaled it manually.
| | 02:17 | I am going to go in here just to show it to you.
| | 02:19 | Okay, so we have to click Rescale over
here and you have got a Scale Factor and
| | 02:25 | we want to affect the entire scene usually.
| | 02:27 | So if I put in a value of 10 then my scene
would be scaled up to be 10 times its current size.
| | 02:33 | If I put in a value of 0.1, it will be
scaled to be 1/10th of its current size.
| | 02:38 | Okay, I am not going to execute that because,
of course, mine is already modeled to scale.
| | 02:43 | The very worst thing you can do would
be to change your System Unit Scale.
| | 02:48 | This is how 3ds Max internally
calculates scale and if you adjust this on an
| | 02:54 | existing scene, you could
actually kill your scene.
| | 02:57 | So I am going to show this to you in
order to warn you away from it and this is
| | 03:02 | a do-not-touch situation, but
I just want to show it to you.
| | 03:06 | In your Customize menu,
you have your Unit Setup.
| | 03:09 | You have probably seen this before.
| | 03:11 | You have got your Display Unit Scale
where you get to choose what units of
| | 03:14 | measure you want to work in.
| | 03:15 | Do you want to work in
metric or US Standard or whatnot?
| | 03:18 | So the Display Unit Scale
doesn't affect the geometry in any way.
| | 03:22 | It just changes how, for example, dialog
boxes read out units or little spinners.
| | 03:29 | With my box a moment ago it was
reading out in feet and inches.
| | 03:32 | So if you change the Display Unit Scale,
it's not going to alter your scene.
| | 03:36 | It's just going to alter your yard
stick, what kind of yard stick are you
| | 03:39 | going to use essentially.
| | 03:40 | This button up here System Unit Setup,
this is the big bad one that could
| | 03:44 | get you into trouble.
| | 03:45 | So I am going to go in here just to illustrate.
| | 03:48 | Okay, the System Unit Setup, this
calculates the actual raw accuracy of 3ds
| | 03:54 | Max as an application.
| | 03:56 | If you went and changed this after you
had built your scene, there is a chance
| | 04:01 | that you would actually destroy your
scene because you might end up with
| | 04:05 | round-off errors in which the computer
didn't know whether a point was here or
| | 04:10 | there and it just collapse them
altogether and you get geometry crumpling and
| | 04:14 | all kinds of horrors.
| | 04:16 | So do not change this at any time.
Except maybe if you are modeling an entire city,
| | 04:21 | you might come in here and change
this to feet or meters or something, but
| | 04:26 | only do that before you start modeling.
| | 04:30 | And the reason this exists is because
you can't have super-huge objects and
| | 04:35 | super-tiny objects in the same scene.
| | 04:37 | So I wouldn't be able to model
something the size of the earth and also have
| | 04:41 | something modeled the size of a person in
the same scene. Just there is not that
| | 04:45 | much accuracy to 3ds Max and in fact,
none of the major media and entertainment
| | 04:50 | 3D applications have that kind of accuracy.
| | 04:53 | It just doesn't exist.
| | 04:54 | There are systems that have that
accuracy, but 3ds Max is not one of them.
| | 04:58 | So again, the System Unit Setup needs to
be left alone unless you are building a
| | 05:02 | very, very large scene and you would
change the System Unit Setup only before
| | 05:07 | you begin modeling and not after.
| | 05:11 | So again model your scene to scale.
| | 05:14 | If you have forgotten to model your
scene to scale, you can use Rescale World
| | 05:17 | Units to get it up to snuff and no
other method is really going to work.
| | 05:21 | So that's really the best
way to deal with the situation.
| | 05:24 | But of course, an ounce of
prevention is worth a pound of cure.
| | 05:27 | So hopefully now that you have heard
this, you will not go down the path of
| | 05:31 | arbitrary scale, but you will have an
absolute real-world one-to-one scale for
| | 05:36 | all of your scenes from now on.
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| Using free lights| 00:00 | Now that you understand the essentials
of how photometrics are supposed to work
| | 00:04 | and the importance of modeling to
scale, we can start building a scene with
| | 00:08 | photometric lighting.
| | 00:10 | We're going to start with a Free
Light because that's the simplest.
| | 00:12 | A Free Light is one that is good for
table lamps, floor lamps, down lights,
| | 00:18 | florescent tubes or any kind of
lighting fixture that does not have a specific
| | 00:23 | directionality to it.
| | 00:24 | If you do need to precisely aim a light,
then you want to use a Target Light
| | 00:29 | instead, but this one is going to be an omni-
directional light that's shining in all directions.
| | 00:34 | So I'm going to go to the Create panel
and under Lights we've got Photometric Lights,
| | 00:40 | and here is Free Light.
| | 00:44 | Now as soon as I start trying to create
that Free Light I get a dialog popping up
| | 00:48 | that says you are
creating a photometric light.
| | 00:50 | It's recommended that you use the
mr Photographic Exposure Control.
| | 00:55 | Would you like to change this now?
| | 00:57 | Well, if it says mr Photographic
Exposure Control, that's good and we should say
| | 01:02 | yes, because Exposure Control always
has to be on when we are working with
| | 01:06 | photometrics, and we'll look at
Exposure Control in great detail later.
| | 01:09 | So I would say yes at this point.
| | 01:12 | Now if you create a light and use
it and this dialog says to you it's
| | 01:16 | recommended that you use logarithmic
or some other type of Exposure Control,
| | 01:22 | then you don't want that because those are
all for the standard default Scanline Renderer.
| | 01:28 | So in mental ray we always want this so
called mr Photographic Exposure Control.
| | 01:33 | So that's fine. We're going to say Yes
to this and that's going to turn it on.
| | 01:37 | So now we are allowed to create our
Free Light, and I'm going to go over to
| | 01:40 | my plan here and I am going to just
zoom in a little bit with the mouse wheel
| | 01:46 | and click once to create the light
and then right-click to finish creating
| | 01:51 | lights, then I go over to Front or
Side view and increase the elevation,
| | 01:57 | move it up to the right height. There we go.
| | 02:03 | So we've got our lamps there
that are photometric Free Light.
| | 02:08 | So now as soon as I do that, you'll see
we're starting to get some illumination
| | 02:12 | in the shaded views, so already
things are working pretty much.
| | 02:17 | Now to help you a little bit with
visualization so you can kind of get a
| | 02:20 | sense of what things are supposed to
look like, for each of the viewports
| | 02:26 | you can go into the controls for that
viewport and in Max 2010, they've got a new
| | 02:31 | way of handling this.
| | 02:32 | There are 3 different menus per viewport
and the one on the right is your Shading mode.
| | 02:37 | So if you left-click on that then you
can go and choose these different shading
| | 02:41 | modes like Wireframe and whatnot, and
additionally you have sections here for
| | 02:46 | Lighting and Shadows.
| | 02:48 | So you can choose to for example
Illuminate with Scene Lights and that's what
| | 02:52 | we are seeing here.
| | 02:53 | If we are having trouble seeing what
we're doing and it's blasting out in the
| | 02:57 | viewport or whatnot, we can choose
Illuminate with Default Lights and now we're
| | 03:01 | back to just seeing with default lighting.
| | 03:04 | This is just an over the shoulder light
that's behind the current viewport's camera.
| | 03:10 | So that sometimes helpful when you
can't see what you're doing because your
| | 03:13 | lights are too intense.
| | 03:17 | Also in this menu, we have the ability
to Enable Hardware Shading and this is
| | 03:23 | supposed to show you a better representation
of what your lighting is going to look like.
| | 03:28 | So it is hardware dependant.
| | 03:30 | It depends upon whether your
computer's graphics adapter is able to support
| | 03:35 | these fancy features.
| | 03:38 | Additionally, under Lighting and
Shadows we have the ability to enable Exposure
| | 03:42 | Control in the viewport, so that's
also good because that gives us a sense of
| | 03:47 | whether we've got the right exposure,
whether our virtual camera's iris is open
| | 03:52 | to the right amount for
the lighting that we have.
| | 03:55 | So these are the options that you have.
| | 03:56 | You can view with scene
lights or with default lights.
| | 04:00 | You can Enable Hardware Shading.
| | 04:02 | If Hardware Shading is on,
you can enable Exposure Control.
| | 04:06 | Now your mileage is going to vary
quite a lot with this depending upon what
| | 04:10 | features your hardware supports, but
it's great that in Max 2010 they have added
| | 04:15 | these features, because previously with
photometrics it was almost impossible to
| | 04:19 | tell what you're going to get
without doing a full rendering.
| | 04:22 | So that's how you'll create a free
light and next we're going to look at
| | 04:25 | adjusting its basic parameters with photometric
templates which are built right into the light itself.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Selecting photometric templates| 00:00 | In our scene we have a single free
light inside the lampshade, but we haven't
| | 00:05 | played around with the intensity
or the color or anything like that.
| | 00:08 | So in order to get good results with
photometrics, we have to pay attention to
| | 00:12 | the settings for the light and
also for the exposure on the camera.
| | 00:16 | Let's see what we have just now.
| | 00:17 | I'm going to open up my rendered
frame window and this is a basic test render,
| | 00:22 | with very low quality settings. Maybe
we'll do a little bit better version of that.
| | 00:27 | So here it is and you can see it's very,
very bright and it's very washed out.
| | 00:31 | We don't have any shadows or
anything like that going on yet.
| | 00:33 | So let's take a look at the
lights' photometric templates.
| | 00:37 | So I'm going to select my Photometric
Light and go to the Modify panel and
| | 00:42 | within here you will see-- scroll up
to the top, Templates, so similar to the
| | 00:48 | material templates. We've got some
common settings that we can just grab.
| | 00:53 | These templates are for some of the most
useful lights that you will come across
| | 00:59 | like incandescent bulbs or
halogen and so on, or even street lamps.
| | 01:06 | The thing that you need to know about
these is that they run a little script
| | 01:10 | that changes a lot of the parameters
of the light, but they don't necessarily
| | 01:16 | change all of the parameters and so
you're going to have to look out for that.
| | 01:20 | It might actually bite you, because you
might think that changing this to some
| | 01:25 | other template is going to change all
of the parameters here, but it may not.
| | 01:31 | So you're going to have to pay
special attention to how that works.
| | 01:34 | So for example, let's say I set this to
100-watt bulb and you'll notice that the
| | 01:39 | intensity in my viewport has
changed and also the color has changed.
| | 01:43 | So these are the most important
parameters of the light that are adjusted when
| | 01:48 | we play around with the
templates when we choose Templates.
| | 01:52 | So scrolling down here,
Distribution is one thing that changes.
| | 01:57 | We'll look at all of these in detail
later, but Light Distribution is basically
| | 02:02 | how does a light spread through the scene.
| | 02:04 | Is it a spot light, is it an omni-
directional light that shines in all
| | 02:07 | directions equally or what?
| | 02:10 | Then we have the Intensity and Color.
| | 02:13 | So here we've got the color temperature.
Again we'll be talking about these in
| | 02:16 | more detail, but this is essentially
the color of the light and then the
| | 02:20 | Intensity measured in various units of measure.
| | 02:25 | I always prefer to use lumens, because
that's the unit of measure that you see
| | 02:30 | most commonly associated
with, for example, a light bulb.
| | 02:33 | When you go to the hardware store
and buy light bulb, it will say how
| | 02:36 | many lumens on the box.
| | 02:38 | And any of this stuff can be tweak
manually after you've have selected the template.
| | 02:42 | There is one more warning, which is
once you've changed some settings on your light,
| | 02:48 | if you go then to create more
lights 3DS Max remembers all the settings
| | 02:53 | on the light that you've adjusted.
| | 02:55 | So that's not really
optimal but that's what it does.
| | 02:59 | So if I create a new light now, it's
going to have all of these settings.
| | 03:03 | It won't just go back to sort of neutral.
| | 03:05 | It's going to kind of do that from now on.
| | 03:08 | So just a warning that it's got that behavior.
| | 03:11 | So that's how you work with templates
and that's how you can set the most basic
| | 03:15 | properties of a photometric light.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding mr photographic exposure control| 00:00 | We have created a photometric light and
chosen a basic template of a 100-watt bulb.
| | 00:05 | Now we are going to play around with
exposure control to get the right look.
| | 00:09 | So this is the rendering from a moment
ago when we just had a default free light
| | 00:14 | without the template chosen.
| | 00:15 | So let's see what happens when we
render this now with a 100-watt bulb.
| | 00:19 | So see it's much more orange and it's
darker and we have also got a pretty
| | 00:25 | strong hotspot here. Part of the reason
for that hotspot is that we don't have
| | 00:28 | any shadows currently yet in the rendering.
| | 00:30 | So next we are going to look at mental
ray's Photographic Exposure Control and
| | 00:35 | this is pretty exciting because it
works just like a real camera and we get the
| | 00:40 | ability to fine-tune the look of our rendering.
| | 00:43 | So we can go the
Rendering menu, Exposure Control.
| | 00:47 | That's one way of getting at it.
| | 00:48 | There is also a button conveniently
located on the rendered frame window so you
| | 00:53 | can get at Environment and Effects
Exposure Control quickly and easily.
| | 00:59 | So you will see mr Photographic Exposure
Control is selected and active and this
| | 01:06 | happened when we first created the Free Light.
| | 01:08 | Remember we were prompted and asked
do you want to enable mr Photographic
| | 01:12 | Exposure Control and the answer we gave was yes.
| | 01:16 | Just to point to you in this dialog there
are bunch of other types of Exposure Control.
| | 01:21 | These only work with the Scanline
Renderer and not with mental ray.
| | 01:25 | So your only choice here is mr
Photographic Exposure Control.
| | 01:30 | Scrolling down a little bit, there is
some presets in here that you can maybe
| | 01:35 | play around with and see what they do.
We have Physically Base Lighting, Indoor
| | 01:39 | and Outdoor, Daytime and Nighttime.
| | 01:41 | So, for example, if I select
Physically Base Lighting Indoor Nighttime,
| | 01:46 | I will get one set of settings and
if I try Indoor Daylight, I will get
| | 01:50 | different settings.
| | 01:52 | I don't tend to use these presets very much
because I always have to adjust the values anyway.
| | 01:58 | Go back to Indoor Nighttime.
| | 02:00 | You'll note that things change in the
viewport when I do this because I have the
| | 02:07 | option of Lighting and Shadows > Enable
Exposure Control in Viewport turned on.
| | 02:13 | So whenever I do something here,
I will see a pretty good preview here.
| | 02:15 | All right, so what do we have in here?
| | 02:19 | Well this works just like a real
camera and we have to set all these settings
| | 02:24 | just like we would with a real
camera and that includes color.
| | 02:27 | So we got some basic sections here
and we are going to look at each one of
| | 02:30 | these in detail. We have got the
Exposure section, which is basically the
| | 02:34 | brightness, and then the Image Control
section, which breaks down into an area
| | 02:39 | that deals with contrast which is here,
and then another area that deals with
| | 02:44 | color which is here.
| | 02:46 | So it's all right here at our fingertips
and next we are going to take a look at
| | 02:49 | Exposure Control for brightness
and contrast with exposure value.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting brightness with exposure value| 00:00 | One of the most important parameters
in mr Photographic Exposure Control is
| | 00:04 | the Exposure Value and this is the
single number that represents how much
| | 00:09 | light is coming into the virtual
camera's sensor and it's a very simple way of
| | 00:14 | controlling brightness.
| | 00:16 | The maximum you will ever need here
is about 15 and that would be on super
| | 00:20 | bright daylight on an exterior scene.
| | 00:23 | The lowest you would want to take
this might be zero or even negative
| | 00:27 | numbers are allowed.
| | 00:29 | So lower numbers let in more light and
that's kind of the opposite of what you
| | 00:35 | might think, but as you see if I
increase this Exposure Value to let's say 5,
| | 00:42 | and press Enter, you will see my
viewport preview becomes much darker.
| | 00:47 | Let me move this over here.
| | 00:49 | So with an Exposure Value of 5
we have got a pretty dim scene.
| | 00:54 | If I increase this number greater,
we are going to be letting in less and
| | 00:57 | less light to the scene.
| | 01:00 | If I set it to like 1, then
that's going to be pretty bright.
| | 01:03 | Now I am not restricted to whole numbers.
I can use fractional numbers if I want.
| | 01:08 | The spinner buttons go up by whole
numbers but I can type in a fractional
| | 01:16 | value if I want like 2.5.
| | 01:18 | These numbers represent essentially F-
stop. If you are a photographer you are
| | 01:22 | familiar with the concept of an F-stop
and as I increase this value by 1, then
| | 01:28 | I am stopping down by one full-stop and
when I stop down by a full-stop,
| | 01:35 | it's letting in half as much light to the camera.
| | 01:38 | That doesn't necessarily relate to half as
much light subjectively in the rendering.
| | 01:44 | In other words, technically I am
letting in half as much light each time I
| | 01:48 | do this but aesthetically it doesn't seem
light gets half as much light in the rendering.
| | 01:59 | So as I mentioned negative numbers are okay.
| | 02:02 | We can actually go into
negative land if we have to.
| | 02:05 | In this case I don't want to because
it's starting to blast out with this 100
| | 02:08 | watt bulb, but you were illuminating a
scene with single candle or something
| | 02:13 | like that it would be necessary
to use a negative Exposure Value.
| | 02:17 | In this case I think a value of
two or three is probably appropriate.
| | 02:20 | Let's do a quick render of
that and see what we get.
| | 02:23 | Okay that's a good starting point.
Maybe I could open up the iris a little bit,
| | 02:30 | so stop-up by one stop.
| | 02:34 | We don't have any shadows in here yet,
so it's a bit over-lit but it's probably
| | 02:38 | a good starting point.
| | 02:39 | So now you know how to adjust the brightness
with Exposure Value form this single number.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using photographic exposure settings| 00:00 | Exposure Value is one way to adjust
the brightness of your rendering by just
| | 00:04 | simply plugging in a single number here.
| | 00:07 | But we can also use real
world metrics to do the same thing.
| | 00:12 | So if you are a photographer and if
you spend your whole life working with F stops
| | 00:16 | and film speeds and so on,
then you can also use this method.
| | 00:20 | We can choose Photographic
exposure and set values here.
| | 00:25 | So for example, I could say I want my
shutter to be open for 30th of a second
| | 00:32 | and I want to shoot at F2 and this is
physically accurate. This is basically the
| | 00:37 | same result that you would get on a set
or a location if you set your camera to
| | 00:43 | these values and had a 100
watt bulb, so let's do a render of that.
| | 00:48 | Now you can see it's quite dim.
| | 00:51 | So you can expect that we would have to
have faster film. We would have to have
| | 00:55 | a higher film speed.
| | 00:57 | Again this is pure optional.
| | 00:58 | You don't have to use this but I like
to use it because it's I get to repurpose
| | 01:03 | my knowledge of how cameras work.
| | 01:05 | So what I recommend that you do in a
case like this is just simply increase the
| | 01:08 | film speed. And there is no limit on
these, we could do whatever we want.
| | 01:12 | Unlike a real camera
our film speed could be infinite.
| | 01:16 | So now let's try ISO 600
and that's still too dim.
| | 01:21 | We could take this up to ISO 1200
or however high we want to take it.
| | 01:27 | Now, the thing that I want you to know
about this is that unlike a real camera,
| | 01:32 | the shutter speed and F stop do not
affect the quality of the rendering.
| | 01:38 | In other words, shutter speed on a real
camera controls how much motion blur you get.
| | 01:43 | If the shutter is open for a long period of
time, moving objects will be really blurred.
| | 01:47 | If the shutter is open for a short period of
time, then objects will have less blur on them.
| | 01:52 | That doesn't work through here.
| | 01:55 | Changing the shutter speed does
not affect your motion blur at all.
| | 01:59 | That's controlled through the
Camera Settings in the Render Setup.
| | 02:03 | So I am just going to show it to you here.
We are not actually going to be doing
| | 02:06 | any animation in this course but to
just kind of illustrate this to you, so you
| | 02:10 | would see that if we go to the
Renderer tab, I have got to scroll down,
| | 02:14 | I am looking for the Camera Settings. Here we go.
| | 02:20 | So it's in the Camera Effects.
| | 02:22 | We can turn on Motion Blur and we have
to set our shutter speed and so on in
| | 02:27 | here instead of in the exposure control.
| | 02:31 | So, don't let that confuse you.
| | 02:33 | This is where we control motion blur.
| | 02:35 | Likewise, if you want depth of field
effects, if you want focusing effects where
| | 02:39 | certain objects are in focus at a
certain distance, objects at another distance
| | 02:43 | might be out of focus.
| | 02:45 | That would be dealt with, once again,
not through the exposure control but
| | 02:50 | through the Camera Effects rollout
within the Render Setup dialog because these
| | 02:57 | depth of field and motion blur effects
are essentially post effects, they are
| | 03:01 | essentially cheats that are
applied after the main scene is rendered.
| | 03:06 | Okay so, all that has to
be dealt with through here.
| | 03:09 | So that's how you would use the photographic
exposure controls to emulate a real camera.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding color temperature| 00:00 | We have got a handle on how to adjust
the brightness using the Exposure Value or
| | 00:05 | the photographic exposure settings.
| | 00:07 | Now let's talk about color because as
you have seen so far, this rendering
| | 00:11 | looks pretty orange.
| | 00:13 | This is because the light is setup
to act like a tungsten filament lamp.
| | 00:19 | So standard incandescent bulb has a
certain color and in fact, all light sources
| | 00:25 | in the real world have a color.
| | 00:27 | The sun is usually white or yellow,
the sky is blue and an incandescent lamp
| | 00:34 | like this one is pretty orange.
| | 00:36 | So color is measured in degrees Kelvin
and that's called its color temperature.
| | 00:42 | This goes back to early research in
which there was a hypothetical black body.
| | 00:48 | If it was heated to a certain temperature,
it would emit a certain color of light.
| | 00:52 | So if it's black at a temperature of 0,
as we heat it up it will go through
| | 00:57 | orange and heat it up some
more, it will turn white.
| | 01:01 | Heat it up even more and it will turn blue.
| | 01:03 | That's the opposite of what you are
used to from art in which we think of red
| | 01:07 | is being a warm color and
blue is being a cool color.
| | 01:11 | But in the world of color temperatures,
in the real world of measuring this
| | 01:15 | black body, in fact, red is
cooler and blue is hotter.
| | 01:20 | Let me show you a chart of
various common color temperatures.
| | 01:25 | So the range here is from about 1800
degrees Kelvin up to about 9300 degrees
| | 01:32 | Kelvin and you will see here sodium
arc lamp has got a very warm color and so
| | 01:38 | that's why street lamps cast
this very strange orange glow.
| | 01:42 | And we will see here, here's an
incandescent bulb, which is rated about
| | 01:47 | 2800 degrees Kelvin.
| | 01:50 | Going up a little bit more, you will
see indoor film or the indoor setting on a
| | 01:55 | digital camera is 3200.
| | 01:58 | Going up a little bit more, outdoor
film or the outdoor setting on a digital
| | 02:02 | camera is 5600 degrees Kelvin
and then we look at daylight.
| | 02:08 | So if you see sunlight on a cloudy day,
it's going to be in the range of 6500
| | 02:14 | degrees Kelvin and that's 6500 is also
a magic number known as D65 which is a
| | 02:20 | reference value and that's what the
default lights are in 3ds Max when you
| | 02:25 | create a Free Light the first time.
| | 02:27 | It will have a color of D65 or 6500.
| | 02:32 | Also you will see that televisions and
computer screens are nominally at 6500
| | 02:38 | degrees, which means if you display
white on your computer screen, it's going to
| | 02:41 | at 65 K. You can also set your
computer screen to be bluer, 9300 degrees K,
| | 02:48 | although that's not that common now.
| | 02:50 | So this is a range going from orange to
white to slightly blue to really blue.
| | 02:58 | So that's a basic concept behind how
color temperature works and in the next video
| | 03:03 | we are going to set the color
temperature of our light and our exposure
| | 03:06 | control so that we will get
the color balance that we desire.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting the exposure whitepoint| 00:00 | With an understanding of how color
temperature works, we can now adjust some
| | 00:04 | settings in 3ds Max to get good renderings.
| | 00:08 | My light is currently selected and
I have got the Modify panel active.
| | 00:13 | And remember I chose the
template of 100-watt bulb.
| | 00:17 | So, let me scroll down here a little
bit here and you will see under Color,
| | 00:23 | we have got our color temperature displayed here.
| | 00:25 | So, 2800 degrees Kelvin is the nominal
color temperature of an incandescent bulb
| | 00:31 | and we have a little swatch here to
indicate basically an approximation of what
| | 00:36 | that color would be.
| | 00:37 | By the way, if you wanted a colored
light or a light that had a gel or some sort
| | 00:42 | of translucent material over it, you
would either model that translucent
| | 00:47 | material and create it with an MR Arch
& Design Material and have that sort of
| | 00:52 | filter the light to get the color that
you want or you could adjust this color
| | 00:57 | swatch here, but what you would not
want to do is push this Kelvin value into
| | 01:02 | some other strange value.
| | 01:04 | In other words, if I want to put a
green gel over this light, I would actually
| | 01:07 | build a green gel or I would adjust
this filter color and make it green.
| | 01:11 | I would not go and mess around with
this because this is a photometric value
| | 01:15 | that's supposed to be physically accurate.
| | 01:17 | So, it should be basically left at
whatever the light would be in the real world.
| | 01:22 | Good. So, we see 2800 degrees Kelvin here
and that's because I chose a template.
| | 01:28 | Over in our Environment and
Effects note this. Whitepoint.
| | 01:33 | So, this is the color of white light
that the camera is expecting to see.
| | 01:40 | So, in other words, if I was sending
out light at 5600 Kelvin here, then the
| | 01:48 | camera would see that as being white.
| | 01:51 | So, just to show you this, if I did put
in 5600 here and press Enter, now we are
| | 01:55 | getting perfectly neutral white in the
viewport and our renderings. All right.
| | 01:59 | I am going to send that back to 2800
because we want to be physically correct here.
| | 02:04 | So, that just goes to illustrate that the
Whitepoint should match the color of the lights.
| | 02:12 | So, just like with a real camera, when you
are indoors, you set your camera to indoor.
| | 02:16 | When you are outdoors, you
set your camera to outdoor.
| | 02:19 | The basic settings that you would use
in Environment and Effects, there are
| | 02:23 | really two that you would use most
commonly, because we are going from the
| | 02:27 | convention of existing real world
cameras that basically have two settings.
| | 02:33 | You have indoor and outdoor.
| | 02:34 | This is the outdoor setting, 5600.
| | 02:38 | If I set this to the indoor setting, that
would be 3200 degrees Kelvin and press Enter.
| | 02:43 | So, now we are seeing a very
slight orange cast to the scene.
| | 02:48 | And that's what we would really see
if we illuminated the room with an
| | 02:52 | incandescent bulb and photographed
it with a camera set to indoor light.
| | 02:57 | So, that's pretty much physically correct.
| | 02:59 | Now, you can still cheat this.
| | 03:01 | This is what you would achieve if you
were in the real world, but here in the
| | 03:05 | digital world we have more freedom.
| | 03:07 | So, we can cheat this.
| | 03:08 | We could actually set the
Whitepoint to whatever we desire.
| | 03:11 | I could set it to 2800 and we are back at
exactly perfectly neutral whites in the rendering.
| | 03:17 | I could push it in any direction.
| | 03:18 | If I wanted this to be extremely orange,
then I would set this to be a higher
| | 03:23 | value like D65, 6500 and
that's an extremely orange color.
| | 03:28 | I don't think that looks good, but I
am just trying to illustrate to you that
| | 03:31 | it's possible to do so.
| | 03:32 | So, it's the differential between the
Whitepoint and the lighting in the scene
| | 03:37 | that causes this tinting.
| | 03:39 | And sort of counter-intuitively, if I
had a very low value to the Whitepoint,
| | 03:47 | if the Whitepoint is lower than the
Kelvin of the lamp itself, then we are
| | 03:52 | going to get a blue cast.
| | 03:54 | If the Whitepoint is high, then we are
going to get an orange cast and if it's
| | 03:58 | right on the money, we will
get perfectly neutral whites.
| | 04:01 | Now, if you are in a mixed lighting setup,
you would also probably need to cheat.
| | 04:06 | So, for example, let's say you had
light coming from outdoors, which would be at
| | 04:10 | maybe 5600 or maybe 6000 degrees
Kelvin, and you simultaneously have an
| | 04:17 | artificial light in your scene that's
maybe at 2800 Kelvin, then you can either
| | 04:22 | pick one of those and sort of let the
chips fall where they may, or you might
| | 04:27 | split the difference and set the
Whitepoint sort of between those two.
| | 04:31 | Every lighting setup is different
so you are going to have to experiment.
| | 04:34 | But at least now you know how to do it.
| | 04:36 | So, that's the importance of a Whitepoint.
| | 04:38 | Usually, I sort of follow the
convention of using real-world numbers and that
| | 04:44 | breaks down to again, if it's an
indoor scene, 3200 degrees Kelvin.
| | 04:48 | If it's an outdoor scene, 5600 degrees Kelvin.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting contrast with exposure image control| 00:00 | We have learned about how to set the
basic brightness with the Exposure Value or
| | 00:06 | the Photographic Exposure Controls and
now we are going to look in a little bit
| | 00:10 | more depth at fine-tuning
the contrast of a rendering.
| | 00:14 | And that's done through the
Image Control section here.
| | 00:17 | The values that I have in here
currently are not the default values.
| | 00:21 | Just so you know, I have already
adjusted these, so that my rendering will look
| | 00:25 | good on the screen here.
| | 00:27 | So, these are actually good values for an
interior scene, at least for a starting point.
| | 00:33 | So you will see here, I have got Highlight
at zero, Mid-tones at 0.5 and Shadows at zero.
| | 00:38 | We are going to take a look at how these work.
| | 00:40 | So, let's do a quick
rendering so that we can compare.
| | 00:46 | So, here it is with values of 0, 0.5 and 0.
| | 00:49 | I am going to clone the rendered frame window.
| | 00:52 | So we will have something to compare it to.
| | 00:54 | I am just going to push that off to the side.
| | 00:57 | So, the default values are more like 0.1
and something like 0.7 or 8 and maybe 0.2.
| | 01:06 | Something like this is more like what
you would see when you first start up the
| | 01:11 | program and what is that going to give us?
| | 01:16 | Well, it's essentially
going to be more contrasty.
| | 01:19 | So, let's see a side by side of this.
| | 01:21 | So, here is mine with 0, 0.5 and the
0 and here it is with the parameters
| | 01:27 | adjusted to be more like the defaults.
| | 01:29 | This is kind of blasting out here and
that's my main reason for adjusting the
| | 01:33 | values the way that I have.
| | 01:35 | So, let's go back and play
around with this a little bit.
| | 01:38 | So, what do these things do?
| | 01:39 | Well, in fact, I have Exposure Control
turned on in my viewport, so we can kind
| | 01:43 | of get an interactive sense of how these work.
| | 01:46 | So, first of all, Highlights or Burn.
As we increase this value, we are going
| | 01:52 | to increase the contrast of our
rendering but what's going to happen is it's
| | 01:56 | going to clip the whites and that means we
are going to lose information in the highlights.
| | 02:01 | So, it's going to just stretch the
contrast, we are going to have a greater
| | 02:04 | Contrast but the downside is that
then our whites are going to be blasted
| | 02:08 | out and then we might have to then
compensate for that by reducing the Exposure Value.
| | 02:13 | So, I want you to bring this down to
like 1200 or something like that and
| | 02:17 | it's still clipping out.
| | 02:18 | Now, we can see here this curve is
hitting a plateau up here and basically all
| | 02:24 | the information in the
whites here is being lost.
| | 02:27 | So, I don't really actually
use this much or really at all.
| | 02:32 | If I do, I would use it very
conservatively with a value of like 0.1 or
| | 02:36 | something like that.
| | 02:38 | See what this looks like at
1600 ISO. Do another render.
| | 02:46 | So, it's still clipping here.
| | 02:47 | So, I really don't use it much, if at all.
| | 02:51 | So, let's send it back to a 0.
| | 02:53 | The Midtones value has to do with
more of the brightness of the Midtones or
| | 03:01 | the intensity of the Midtones,
without affecting either end or the top or
| | 03:07 | bottom of the contrast range.
| | 03:10 | So, this is one way that we can actually
reduce contrast is by increasing the Midtones.
| | 03:16 | So, let's see what this gives us.
| | 03:20 | So it's much brighter out here
and yet it's not clipping over here.
| | 03:24 | We should be able to see that in the
viewport too, as I play around with this.
| | 03:29 | So, lower values to the Midtones are
going to increase contrast; higher values
| | 03:34 | are going to decrease the contrast.
| | 03:36 | I will set it back to at 0.5.
| | 03:40 | And in the Shadows, higher values
increase contrast by crushing the blacks.
| | 03:47 | So, I don't really use this very much
either because if I increase the Shadow
| | 03:52 | parameter, it's going to make my
scene more contrasty but then the darkest
| | 03:57 | regions here are going to sent closer
and closer towards black and we will
| | 04:01 | basically be losing information here as well.
| | 04:03 | So, if I want the full range of
Brightness values in my rendering.
| | 04:08 | I will actually usually set
Highlights to 0 and Shadows to 0 and then the
| | 04:12 | Midtones somewhere between maybe 0.5 to
0.7 at the most for an interior scene.
| | 04:18 | For exterior scenes, the
rules are a little bit different.
| | 04:21 | When we get to exterior lighting,
we will talk about setting image control
| | 04:24 | appropriately for an exterior scene.
| | 04:26 | But for interiors, this is
probably a good place to be.
| | 04:30 | So, I will go ahead and do a render.
| | 04:34 | And that's how we would control the
contrast of our rendering with the Image
| | 04:38 | Control settings in the mr
Photographic Exposure Control.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
7. Advanced PhotometricsInstalling and using photometric .IES files| 00:00 | We are going to delve into advanced
photometrics and getting full control over
| | 00:05 | the behavior of the lights in our scene.
| | 00:08 | Now, there are several different ways
of controlling photometrics and one is
| | 00:12 | to use an IES file.
| | 00:14 | This stands for Illuminating
Engineering Society, and IES files are text files
| | 00:19 | provided by a lighting manufacturer
for precisely this purpose, for doing
| | 00:24 | simulations of lighting in a computer.
| | 00:27 | So I've got one here that I can show you,
bring that up in a Notepad document,
| | 00:33 | and this is just an example of
what an IES files looks like.
| | 00:37 | And you could actually write your own
IES files but you are probably just going
| | 00:40 | to download it from the lighting
manufacturer's website or maybe from a website
| | 00:44 | that is a retailer, a wholesaler
that has many different manufacturer's
| | 00:49 | products available.
| | 00:52 | Once you have downloaded an IES file,
you are going to need to put it into your
| | 00:57 | current project, so let's
take a look at that too.
| | 01:00 | I'm going to go around and open this up.
| | 01:04 | So here is my current project for this
chapter, Advanced_Photometrics, and under
| | 01:10 | sceneassets/photometric,
| | 01:12 | I have stored several of these IES
files, and this is exactly the only place
| | 01:19 | where the IES files are allowed to live.
| | 01:23 | You must place your IES files in
this folder and no other location.
| | 01:29 | If you put them anywhere
else, they won't be found.
| | 01:32 | And IES files are kind of like a
texture in which this information is for
| | 01:38 | some reason not embedded in the Max scene file.
| | 01:41 | It's always stored externally.
| | 01:43 | So again, you'll download the IES file
and you'll place it into your current
| | 01:47 | project under sceneassets/photometric.
| | 01:50 | Then and only then will you be able to use it.
| | 01:53 | Okay, so here we go.
| | 01:54 | I'm going to create a new
Photometric Free Light for these track lights.
| | 02:02 | So I'm going to go in a little bit
closer in my top view and create the light
| | 02:09 | just there and then right-click to
exit out of light creation and move it in
| | 02:16 | my front or side view.
| | 02:19 | Now the position of the light relative
to the light fixture might be something
| | 02:23 | that you need to adjust,
especially if you are casting shadows.
| | 02:27 | So this is an area where there is a
little bit of room for interpretation.
| | 02:32 | Should the light icon be right sort of
on the edge of the geometry of the light
| | 02:37 | fixture, or should it be inside?
| | 02:39 | You are going to have to
experiment with that and see what works.
| | 02:42 | I'm going to place it right on
the edge here and leave that alone.
| | 02:46 | Next step with the light selected,
I'll go to the Modify panel and in order to
| | 02:51 | use this IES file, what I need to do
is choose a different distribution type.
| | 02:57 | So in this General Parameters roll out
you'll see Light Distribution (Type).
| | 03:02 | We're going to look at the rest of
these in a moment but right now I'm going to
| | 03:04 | go straightforward Photometric
Web, and click Photometric Web.
| | 03:11 | Scrolling back around.
| | 03:12 | For some reason it's changed
all my rollouts but here we go.
| | 03:16 | Now, I've got a new rollout here that
says Distribution (Photometric Web), then
| | 03:23 | I can click to choose the IES file.
| | 03:27 | And it will take me directly to the
sceneassets/photometric folder in
| | 03:32 | my current project.
| | 03:33 | So I have several of them here.
Let's try one of these.
| | 03:37 | And you'll see a little preview here of
the distribution function of the light.
| | 03:41 | Go ahead and click Open and now
you'll see we have a much stronger
| | 03:46 | illumination on the scene.
| | 03:48 | Let's make sure that I'm actually
visualizing Exposure Control, to get a better
| | 03:53 | sense of this is really for real.
| | 03:55 | So that's a better approximation
of what's going to happen when I
| | 03:58 | actually render this.
| | 04:00 | Why don't we do that?
| | 04:01 | I'll go ahead and do a quickie render, and
you can see it's kind of blasting out there.
| | 04:06 | So, that would mean of course I would want to
increase the Exposure Value to let in less light.
| | 04:14 | So that's a spot light and that's
what I expect to see from a spot light.
| | 04:17 | And currently, I have Final Gather turned off.
| | 04:20 | Maybe I'll turn it back on again,
so we can get a better sense.
| | 04:24 | All right, so that probably
wants to go up even higher.
| | 04:28 | So it's going to depend upon
the exact lighting properties.
| | 04:32 | What exposure value you would want to choose.
| | 04:35 | So that's pretty cool. I like that.
| | 04:37 | Let's try a different IES file.
| | 04:39 | I'll go and click here again and choose
a different one and you'll see this one
| | 04:44 | has a broader pattern here.
| | 04:46 | It's got a greater angle of spread,
I can tell by looking the diagram.
| | 04:52 | Go ahead and click Open, and then render,
and you'll see this one is more of a
| | 04:58 | flood distribution and it's not as intense.
| | 05:01 | So, if I were to use this one, then of
course I would go back into my Exposure
| | 05:05 | Control and tweak that accordingly.
| | 05:07 | I'm going to use this one, the first
one we did, because I think that one is
| | 05:11 | doing more or less what I want.
| | 05:14 | So sometimes when you use these IES
files you might end up having to adjust
| | 05:21 | the rotation values.
| | 05:23 | For some reason, they don't
always point straight down.
| | 05:26 | You can see the icon here
is pointing straight down.
| | 05:28 | Sometimes it might be pointed in some
strange direction, and what I recommend
| | 05:32 | you do is adjust these rotation values
here in order to align the light icon
| | 05:41 | with whatever fixture
it's going to be attached to.
| | 05:45 | So in other words, the way that I want
to focus this is I want to rotate the
| | 05:49 | geometry here of the actual can of the
light fixture and I want the Photometric
| | 05:54 | light to be parented, so that when I
rotate the can the light will rotate too.
| | 06:00 | And in order for that to work correctly,
I want to set these values such that
| | 06:04 | the light is pointing in the
same direction as the fixture.
| | 06:07 | Like I said, they don't always point
in the right direction just sort of
| | 06:10 | straight out the box.
| | 06:11 | All right, so I'm going to parent these.
| | 06:14 | I'm just going to grab my Link tool,
Select and Link, click and drag and release.
| | 06:20 | And now the light icon is parented to the
fixture and then I can focus the fixture.
| | 06:26 | So I can rotate the can.
| | 06:28 | There we go, so I can focus that on the wall.
| | 06:31 | Now, how cool is that?
| | 06:33 | Really neat, all right.
| | 06:34 | So what do we get when we render this?
| | 06:37 | So we have got the light
splashing on the picture.
| | 06:39 | I don't have any shadows currently.
| | 06:41 | But you'll notice that we're not
getting any light behind the light icon.
| | 06:46 | So if wanted to maybe fine tune this
a little bit, I might move the light
| | 06:49 | inside of the can and enable Shadows so that
we would have a more accurate distribution here.
| | 06:55 | So why don't I do that?
| | 06:56 | I'm going to select the light, and I'm
going to move it in Local space instead
| | 07:00 | of World space, just so I
can push it back inside.
| | 07:05 | And finally, I'm going to turn on
Shadows. We're going to look at Shadows in
| | 07:08 | more detail in a moment.
| | 07:10 | But I'm just going to turn them on for
the light, and I'll choose Ray Traced
| | 07:14 | Shadows, which is usually my
best bet with photometric lights.
| | 07:18 | And so now let's do a side-by-side comparison.
| | 07:21 | Here it is with no Shadows and the
lamp is sort of sitting on the edge of
| | 07:26 | the can here, and I'll make a clone of
this window so that we can compare and render.
| | 07:33 | So now with Shadows enabled, we're getting a
clear delineation of the edge of the light.
| | 07:40 | Later we can play around with
soft shadows and make that prettier.
| | 07:43 | But I think that's good enough to get
you started with using these photometric
| | 07:47 | IES files to achieve physically
accurate results based upon real world
| | 07:54 | lighting instruments.
| | 07:55 | That's a very valuable thing to be
able to do for architects and interior
| | 07:59 | designers as well as artists of all kinds.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Choosing a light distribution type| 00:00 | We have looked at using an IES file
to exactly correspond to an existing
| | 00:06 | lighting fixture in the real world.
| | 00:08 | But we don't always need that and if we
are working on a film or something like that,
| | 00:12 | it might not really be
important to be physically accurate.
| | 00:15 | So we can play around with different
types of light distribution pattern.
| | 00:20 | So I will just go ahead and select the
light and go the Modify panel once again.
| | 00:24 | We will take a look at
different distribution types.
| | 00:28 | So, scrolling back up here at the
very top, General Parameters > Light
| | 00:34 | Distribution (Type).
| | 00:35 | So we have seen Photometric
Web and there are others here.
| | 00:39 | The default is Uniform Spherical and
I will choose that Uniform Spherical.
| | 00:46 | You will notice that it suddenly
became a lot brighter because it took the
| | 00:50 | intensity value from that IES file
that we had and now it's being spread over
| | 00:56 | the entire scene rather than just
focused in on the one picture on the wall.
| | 01:01 | So, Uniform Spherical behaves like
an omni-directional light source.
| | 01:07 | So tell you what, I am going to make this
bigger so the panels won't jump around as much.
| | 01:13 | So here we go, we have got Uniform
Spherical and that's just going to shine
| | 01:18 | light in all directions equally and if I
turn my shadows back off again and do a
| | 01:23 | it's probably going to
be too bright. But there you go.
| | 01:27 | You can see the light
shining equally in all directions.
| | 01:30 | We also have Uniform Diffuse and
that's a bit confusing because you would
| | 01:37 | think Uniform Spherical and Uniform Diffuse
would be the same, but they are actually not.
| | 01:42 | Uniform Diffuse is a hemisphere and you
can kind of see that here. There is no
| | 01:47 | light on this side of the room because
my light is pointing in this direction.
| | 01:53 | So the -Z direction of the
light is its sort of hot area.
| | 01:58 | So Uniform Diffuse is
hemispherical, so this should really say
| | 02:01 | Uniform Hemisphere.
| | 02:03 | See what that looks like when I render.
| | 02:05 | So there's no shadows being cast.
| | 02:07 | We do have Final Gather on, however,
so we are getting some splash on the
| | 02:10 | other side of the room.
| | 02:12 | Uniform Diffuse is good for down lights
and up lights so you don't need to worry
| | 02:17 | about rotation angles or anything like that.
| | 02:20 | You just drop a Uniform Diffuse
lamp in there and you are good to go.
| | 02:24 | Finally, we also have Spotlights and
we are going to spend a whole video
| | 02:28 | looking at Spotlights.
| | 02:31 | But for now, I can just turn that on.
| | 02:32 | You can see we are
getting a Spotlight on the wall.
| | 02:35 | This is similar to what I had with
the IES file because the IES files I was
| | 02:39 | using were for Spotlights.
| | 02:41 | But here we have control over it in a
way that we would never have with the IES file
| | 02:46 | and we could tweak it to get a
specific artistic effect whereas with the
| | 02:50 | IES file, we are locked into whatever
the photometric properties are in the
| | 02:56 | real-world lighting situation. Good!
| | 02:59 | So those are your different
types of distribution light.
| | 03:02 | You got IES, Uniform Spherical,
Uniform Diffuse, which is hemispherical,
| | 03:08 | and finally, Spotlight.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting light intensity| 00:00 | We are going to take a closer look at
adjusting the intensity of photometric
| | 00:05 | lights using 3ds Max.
| | 00:07 | So, I've got a single
Photometric Free Light inside my lamp here.
| | 00:12 | I have selected it, and I've gone to
the Modify panel, and let's take a look at
| | 00:16 | the Intensity/Color/Attenuation rollout.
| | 00:19 | Right now it's displaying the default values
from a brand new light, which are 1500 candelas.
| | 00:27 | Well, as I said before, I recommend
that you switch over to lumens instead of candelas.
| | 00:33 | Because when you look up the intensity
of a light on the web or when you buy a
| | 00:39 | light in a hardware store, it's
going to be rated in lumens not candelas.
| | 00:44 | So, you see here now I have a Free Light
with an intensity of about 18000 or 19000 lm.
| | 00:53 | That's actually pretty high.
| | 00:54 | Let's take a look at a chart I've made
to show you sort of the range of common
| | 00:59 | artificial light intensities.
| | 01:01 | So these are lumens values for the most
common types of lights that you will encounter.
| | 01:06 | So you'll see an incandescent
bulb of 40 watts is only 480 lumens.
| | 01:13 | An incandescent bulb of 100
watts is about 1,700 lumens.
| | 01:18 | A metal halide light for outdoor
artificial lighting is 12,000 lumens, which is
| | 01:25 | quite a lot more than a standard
light bulb you would find in your home.
| | 01:30 | So the lumen value here by default is excessive.
| | 01:35 | So if I want to bring this down into a
range that I can use, I would need to
| | 01:39 | adjust this lumen value.
| | 01:41 | Note also, we can learn a
lot by just choosing templates.
| | 01:45 | I can click here and say well
what's the lumen value of a 100W Bulb?
| | 01:50 | Click on that, switch over
to cd to lm, and there it is.
| | 01:54 | It's about 1,750 lumens.
| | 01:58 | Notice that now the rendering is much
more orange, because of course the color
| | 02:03 | temperature of an
incandescent bulb is only 2,800.
| | 02:05 | So we can play around with these values
in order to get specific lighting setups.
| | 02:12 | So even if we don't have the IES
file, we can still get pretty close to
| | 02:17 | physically accurate if we know the lumen
value and the color temperature and
| | 02:23 | the basic distribution pattern
of the light in question.
| | 02:27 | So, if I wanted this to be a 40W Bulb,
instead of a 100W Bulb, I could choose it
| | 02:32 | from the Templates or I could just
type it in here and it's about 480 lumens,
| | 02:36 | and it's a very dim bulb.
| | 02:38 | And if I try to render this I'm
probably not going to get much, because my
| | 02:43 | exposure is not set for that.
| | 02:44 | So you see it's very dim.
| | 02:48 | Reduce the Exposure Value to let in more light.
| | 02:52 | Another quick render and see what we get.
| | 02:54 | So that's a 40W bulb. Probably my
Exposure Value can probably come up again a
| | 02:59 | little bit from there.
| | 03:00 | Now, we don't have any Shadows in this
scene yet, so once we add Shadows
| | 03:07 | it's going to be considerably darker.
| | 03:09 | One last thing about using Intensity.
| | 03:12 | Be careful about this Dimming section here.
| | 03:16 | It's kind of strange. The Dimming
sometimes wants to turn itself on for
| | 03:21 | no apparent reason.
| | 03:23 | It's a bit inexplicable.
| | 03:24 | But what this does is when you
activate this, then you're able to adjust the
| | 03:29 | Intensity as if you had a dimmer on that light.
| | 03:34 | So we start with a 40W Bulb but then as
we dim it down it will eventually wink
| | 03:40 | out when we get to 0.
| | 03:41 | So if this value is at 100,
then we have 480 lumens.
| | 03:45 | There is also an option to color shift
it as we go down because when you dim a
| | 03:51 | light in the real world
it shifts towards orange.
| | 03:57 | So just be cautious of this.
| | 03:58 | Don't use this as a primary method
of setting your initial Intensity.
| | 04:03 | Only use this if you want to animate
the effect of light dimming according to
| | 04:08 | a dimmer on the wall.
| | 04:10 | So that's how you would deal with
Intensity to get physically accurate results
| | 04:15 | even if you don't have an IES file to work from.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using target lights| 00:00 | So far we have looked at three photometric
lights, which are aimed through rotation.
| | 00:06 | You either rotate the light icon itself
or as you saw here, I parented the light
| | 00:11 | to a piece of geometry and
then rotated the geometry.
| | 00:14 | Another way of aiming or
focusing lights is through a target.
| | 00:18 | So let's look at target lights.
| | 00:20 | I am going to create a new one.
| | 00:22 | Create > Lights > Target Light and it
works just the same as it does in standard
| | 00:29 | lights so you might have seen this before.
| | 00:31 | All you have to do is click and hold
the mouse and drag out to determine the
| | 00:37 | target location and then release
to complete the process of creation.
| | 00:42 | When you are finished, you can right
-click anywhere in the viewport to
| | 00:45 | exit light creation.
| | 00:48 | Then you can just aim the
light by moving the target.
| | 00:51 | However, the default photometric
distribution type is Uniform Spherical.
| | 00:57 | So it is an omni-directional light.
| | 00:59 | So as I move the target around I
don't see any change in my lighting.
| | 01:03 | So I will have to use some other
distribution type, not a Uniform Spherical.
| | 01:08 | So I will select the Light, go to the
Modify panel and just choose some other
| | 01:13 | distribution type such as Uniform
Diffuse, which once again is a hemispherical
| | 01:18 | light distribution type.
| | 01:20 | As I move this around, you are seeing
the effect of a hemispherical or a Uniform
| | 01:25 | Diffuse distribution type.
| | 01:28 | If you do use IES files in conjunction
with targets make sure that you rotate
| | 01:32 | the IES file using the parameters in
the Modify panel such that it will line up
| | 01:38 | pointing at its target.
| | 01:40 | Okay, so that's the basics of using Targets.
| | 01:42 | It's pretty straightforward.
| | 01:44 | One other thing you can do with this is you
can actually turn Targets on and off at will.
| | 01:48 | So for example, I have got this
spotlight over here and let's say I want to
| | 01:52 | focus it a little bit more
precisely than I could by rotation.
| | 01:55 | I could actually turn Targets on.
| | 01:57 | So now it's got a target and it's out here.
| | 02:01 | I can change the distance of the target.
| | 02:03 | I could either move it using local
coordinates or I could adjust the
| | 02:08 | target distance here.
| | 02:10 | So I have to turn Targets off
ironically in order to set the target distance
| | 02:15 | that I could say set the target
distance to only 6 feet and then re-enable it.
| | 02:20 | So this gives me a little bit more
control than I would have if I just rotated it,
| | 02:25 | so I can get really
micro-fine adjustments on that.
| | 02:28 | So that's the basic behavior of Target Lights in
3ds Max both for photometric and standard lights.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting spotlight hotspot and falloff angles| 00:00 | To get a full control over
spotlights, you want to adjust the Hotspot
| | 00:05 | and Falloff angles.
| | 00:08 | And again, if you are used of standard
lighting in 3ds Max, it works very similarly.
| | 00:12 | The basic concept is that for any
Spotlight distribution type, you've got two cones.
| | 00:20 | So you got an inner cone, which is
light blue, and then you got an outer cone,
| | 00:25 | which is a little bit darker blue.
| | 00:26 | The inner cone is the Hotspot area;
| | 00:30 | the outer cone is the Falloff area.
| | 00:32 | And what happens is the area inside
the Hotspot is at full intensity, and the
| | 00:40 | intensity falls off until it
reaches 0 intensity at the Falloff radius.
| | 00:48 | So, inside the Hotspot radius it's a 100%
intensity, and then it will gradually
| | 00:52 | diminish in intensity until it
reaches the Falloff radius angle.
| | 00:57 | So that's how we can get
soft effects on rendering here.
| | 01:02 | So it doesn't look like it's a
perfectly hard-edged Spotlight.
| | 01:06 | In the viewport it looks a pretty hard-
edged right now, but I bet if I rendered this,
| | 01:10 | it will be considerably nicer.
| | 01:14 | So I'm going to choose this Camera04_spotlight.
| | 01:16 | Go ahead and render that, and as you
can see we're getting a nice soft look.
| | 01:23 | So I can adjust the Hotspot and
Falloff angles to get different effects.
| | 01:27 | If I have a very small Hotspot, relative
to the Falloff angle, then I'm going to
| | 01:34 | get a much softer look.
| | 01:36 | Go back to my Render view and I'll make
a clone of this so we can see the change.
| | 01:45 | So, on the left we have a small Hotspot
and on the right we have a large Hotspot.
| | 01:50 | We can also adjust the Falloff itself
and get a larger spread, but you're going
| | 02:00 | to have to experiment with
this and see what you get.
| | 02:03 | If they're both very close to one another,
then you are going to get a really hard edge.
| | 02:08 | Notice that it's actually brighter now.
As I increase the Hotspot and Falloff angles,
| | 02:13 | I get more illumination.
| | 02:14 | So watch the lumens value as I adjust the Hotspot.
| | 02:20 | If I reduce the Hotspot,
the number of lumens goes down.
| | 02:24 | If I increase the Hotspot,
the number of lumens goes up.
| | 02:29 | So, it's trying to emulate the
behavior of real world lighting.
| | 02:33 | So this is the basic principle of
working with Hotspot and Falloff.
| | 02:37 | There is one more fun thing you can do
which is you can actually go in to Select
| | 02:42 | and Manipulate mode and then you can
click on the Hotspot and the Falloff angles
| | 02:47 | in the viewport and adjust them directly.
| | 02:50 | Turn Manipulators back off again.
| | 02:52 | That's how you can control Hotspot and
Falloff to get different effects with spotlights.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Emitting light from shape| 00:00 | The last property of lights that we're
going to look at here is the shape of the light.
| | 00:04 | When you create a Photometric light,
by default it's a point light source
| | 00:10 | and that's a very computationally efficient
lighting model but it's not very visually accurate.
| | 00:17 | In other words, with a point light
source, you can't get soft shadows.
| | 00:21 | You can't get soft ambient lighting effects.
| | 00:25 | So if you want soft shadows and soft
lights for example from a florescent tube
| | 00:30 | you are going to need to
change the shape of the light.
| | 00:32 | Just take a look at that.
| | 00:34 | So, I am going to go and select the
light, and go to the Modify panel.
| | 00:37 | And right now I don't have Shadows, so I won't
really be able to see much if I render this now.
| | 00:43 | I won't really be able to tell much
difference between a soft light and a
| | 00:47 | standard point light.
| | 00:49 | So, I have got to turn on Shadows
and I want to use Ray Traced Shadows.
| | 00:52 | We are going to have an entire chapter
devoted to Shadows but for now we're just
| | 00:56 | going to turn them on and choose Ray Traced.
| | 00:59 | I'll go ahead and render this
Camera04 view here to see what I get.
| | 01:04 | So, that's what I get
from a standard point light.
| | 01:08 | I get this hard edge to this Shadow here.
| | 01:11 | Pay no attention to this garbage here.
| | 01:12 | That's just an inaccurate final gather.
| | 01:15 | What we're really paying attention to
here is the shape of this Shadow here.
| | 01:19 | All right, so I'm going to go ahead
and save that so I will have something
| | 01:25 | to compare this to.
| | 01:28 | So with the light selected in the
Modify panel, I'm going to change the shape
| | 01:31 | and it's found here in the rollout labeled
Shape/Area Shadows and the default is Point.
| | 01:39 | So I've got options here. I have got
Line, Rectangle, Disc's here, etcetera.
| | 01:43 | The ones that I use most
often are Sphere and Line.
| | 01:48 | For an incandescent bulb,
I would probably use a Sphere.
| | 01:52 | All right, so let's see what this gives me.
| | 01:55 | So when I get in closer here, you'll see
I've got a sphere around my light source.
| | 02:00 | Let's close some of these windows here so
you can get a better sense. So there it is.
| | 02:05 | I've got a sphere.
| | 02:06 | I'm going to press P in my Front View
to convert that to a Perspective View, so
| | 02:10 | I can orbit around it.
| | 02:13 | See there is in fact a sphere inside there.
| | 02:17 | So, sphere is good for, as
I said, incandescent lights.
| | 02:20 | They are omnidirectional and
shine in all directions equally.
| | 02:24 | I've got a Radius parameter for this sphere.
| | 02:27 | 5 inches radius is probably too much.
| | 02:29 | I probably want something more like 2 inches.
| | 02:32 | And then we're going to take a look at this.
| | 02:35 | So there is our original with just a
Point light source, go ahead and click
| | 02:39 | Render and voila, we got soft shadows.
| | 02:42 | And it's physically accurate.
| | 02:44 | You'll notice that the Shadow is much
sharper here and then with distance it
| | 02:48 | starts to become softer and softer.
| | 02:51 | So that's the sort of effect
that we would see in the real world.
| | 02:55 | We also want to play around with the
sampling quality, so down here you'll see
| | 03:00 | Shadow Samples, and you'll usually
need to increase this to 64 or higher.
| | 03:06 | So let's compare this with our original.
| | 03:08 | So this was Point light source, and
then what we will do a Sphere with Shadow
| | 03:14 | Samples set to 64, pretty nice.
| | 03:19 | And if I increase the Radius,
the Shadows become softer and softer.
| | 03:24 | So if I went back to a Radius of 5
inches and re-rendered, I would get
| | 03:29 | really soft shadows.
| | 03:30 | But it would probably be excessive.
| | 03:32 | Yeah, I'm not really buying that.
| | 03:36 | I think it was better at 2 inches.
| | 03:38 | So that's good for incandescent lights.
| | 03:40 | If you're working with fluorescent
tubes then you would want to use a Line type
| | 03:45 | or maybe a Cylinder type.
| | 03:49 | So, we'll just take a quick look at that.
| | 03:51 | We have different types of shapes here.
We have Line and you'll see we got a
| | 03:56 | linear light source there.
| | 03:59 | And that's good if you've got lots
of fluorescent tubes because of course
| | 04:03 | the more of these you have in
your scene, the slower and slower the
| | 04:06 | rendering is going to be.
| | 04:07 | So if you've got lots of
fluorescent tubes you can use Line.
| | 04:09 | If you just got a few, I would
recommend using a Cylinder type.
| | 04:14 | Probably need to reduce the Radius to
something more like 0.5, and that would be
| | 04:18 | a pretty physically accurate
simulation of a fluorescent tube.
| | 04:23 | Obviously, not applicable to this
particular scene but we're just going to
| | 04:26 | show you your options.
| | 04:28 | If you are trying to represent a studio
soft light, you could use a Rectangle.
| | 04:34 | This is traditionally known as an Area light.
| | 04:38 | And it's got a Length and a Width and you can
play around with that to dial in whatever size.
| | 04:43 | You'll notice with these, similar to
when we adjusted a Spotlight, we'll get
| | 04:48 | different amounts of Intensity.
| | 04:50 | So as I increase the size of my
Area light, I'll get more illumination.
| | 04:57 | And as I reduce the size of the
Area light, I'll get less illumination.
| | 05:01 | So that's just a basic
introduction to using Area lights or so-called
| | 05:06 | Shapes/Area/Shadows in
3ds Max photometric lights.
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|
|
8. ShadowsUnderstanding the pros and cons of shadow types| 00:00 | Let's take a deeper look
at shadows in mental ray.
| | 00:04 | First we need to understand the pros
and cons of the various shadow types.
| | 00:07 | You've got three options in
mental ray for your shadows.
| | 00:11 | You've got Ray Traced, Shadow
Map and mental ray Shadow Map.
| | 00:14 | So I am going to select my light here and
so far we've looked at Ray Traced Shadows.
| | 00:21 | We can choose different types here and
we want to talk a little bit about the
| | 00:25 | pros and cons of each.
| | 00:27 | You know that there are five
different types of shadows here.
| | 00:30 | The only ones that are relevant in
mental ray are Ray Traced, Shadow Map and
| | 00:36 | mental ray Shadow Map.
| | 00:37 | The others will just be converted to Ray
Traced Shadows if you try to select them.
| | 00:43 | Okay, so Ray Traced Shadows, what does those do?
| | 00:46 | A Ray Traced Shadow is vector-based,
which means that from the point of view of
| | 00:51 | a light, lines are drawn out to determine
whether a surface is going to block the light or not.
| | 00:57 | In the case of a lampshade if we drew
the lines straight up, then the light
| | 01:02 | would not be blocked and
there would be no shadow there.
| | 01:04 | If we drew a line out to the side, the
light would be blocked by the lampshade
| | 01:08 | and we would get a shadow on the wall.
| | 01:10 | So, that means that these shadows are
resolution independent and you won't get
| | 01:15 | any aliasing or jagged edges on the shadows.
| | 01:19 | You'll also be able to get the benefits
of soft shadows if you have a non-point
| | 01:26 | shadow shape, anything except a point
and you'll get soft shadows and also
| | 01:32 | transparency is respected by Ray Traced Shadows.
| | 01:36 | So if you have a transparent material,
you'll get transparent shadows.
| | 01:40 | Ray Tracing is the easiest one to set up
because you don't have to fuss with any
| | 01:44 | parameters but the down side
is you get longer render times.
| | 01:48 | So, if you've a lot of lights in your
scene, you should use Ray Traced Shadows
| | 01:53 | sparingly if at all.
| | 01:55 | So, what are the alternatives?
| | 01:56 | Well, you've got Shadow Map and a Shadow Map
shadow is pixel-based rather than vector-based.
| | 02:04 | So, the way it works is it creates
an image of the shadow and projects it
| | 02:09 | onto surfaces and so if you're not
careful your Shadow Maps can exhibit
| | 02:14 | aliasing or jagged edges.
| | 02:16 | We'll take a look at that in the later video.
| | 02:19 | But they are much faster to
render than Ray Traced Shadows.
| | 02:23 | The down side of these standard
Shadow Maps is that they do not
| | 02:26 | respect transparency.
| | 02:28 | So, if I wanted a translucent lampshade
I would still get solid black shadows on the wall.
| | 02:32 | There's another alternative,
which is the mental ray Shadow Map.
| | 02:38 | Mental ray Shadow Maps are a fancier
version of standard Shadow Maps, which does
| | 02:44 | respect transparency.
| | 02:46 | So, that's really the only difference
between the standard Shadow Maps and the
| | 02:50 | mr Shadow Maps is that mr Shadow Maps
behave exactly the same pretty much,
| | 02:56 | except that they do respect transparency.
| | 02:58 | So those are your three options, Ray
Traced, Shadow Map, and mr Shadow Map, and
| | 03:04 | just to recap, Ray Traced Shadows
will give you soft shadows and give you
| | 03:09 | transparent shadows and
will not give you jagged edges.
| | 03:13 | They're easy to set up but
they take longer to render.
| | 03:16 | Shadow Maps you'll have to tweak them a
little bit to get them to look good but
| | 03:20 | they'll render much more quickly.
| | 03:21 | Standard Shadow Maps do not support
transparency and mr Shadow Maps do.
| | 03:26 | Next we're going to look at how to
control shadows on per object basis so we can
| | 03:31 | tell an object to cast shadows or not.
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| Controlling shadows via object properties| 00:00 | Before going deeper into the parameters
of shadows to get different looks,
| | 00:04 | let's talk a moment about how to control the
object properties of objects, so that we
| | 00:11 | can tell them to cast or receive shadows or not.
| | 00:14 | You'll need to do this
sometimes to optimize your scene.
| | 00:17 | For example, with this scene I've got
this floor lamp and I've got these very
| | 00:22 | thin pieces of geometry and
effectively they really shouldn't cast shadows,
| | 00:28 | because in the real world they would
just be too thin to cast a shadow onto a
| | 00:32 | wall or onto the ground.
| | 00:33 | So what I can do is I can select
these objects, just select those two right
| | 00:40 | click to get my Quad menu and go to the
Object Properties and inside here I can
| | 00:46 | disable Casting and Receiving Shadows
and this is a global setting for all
| | 00:51 | lights in the scene.
| | 00:52 | So that now, when I render this we will
not get any shadows cast by those objects.
| | 00:57 | In fact, we wouldn't notice the
difference visually and that's precisely why
| | 01:02 | I would turn them off is because if we
can see it we shouldn't be calculating
| | 01:06 | it in the first place.
| | 01:07 | You'll also want to disable Casting
Shadows and Receiving Shadows for any kind
| | 01:12 | of glass or transparent window glazing.
| | 01:14 | There was a solid glass vase you might want
it to cast shadows but not receive shadows.
| | 01:20 | If it was a window glazing you
wouldn't want it to cast or receive shadows.
| | 01:24 | So, that's how you can control shadow
casting and reception on a per object basis.
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| Controlling shadows via light exclusion| 00:00 | We've seen how to control object
properties to enable or disable shadow casting
| | 00:06 | and reception globally, in
other words on a per object basis,
| | 00:10 | tell it to ignore the shadows from all lights.
| | 00:14 | But what if we need more control?
| | 00:16 | Let's say we have a scene like this in
which there are two lights and we want a
| | 00:23 | little bit more control in which --
let's say we want this track light to not
| | 00:28 | cast a shadow onto the
wall behind the lampshade.
| | 00:33 | So, for example here take a look at this.
| | 00:35 | There's a very subtle effect here in
which we're getting a very indistinct
| | 00:39 | shadow being cast from the track light.
| | 00:42 | Because that is so subtle, we probably
want to turn that off, because it's not
| | 00:48 | really contributing much to the visual
impact of the scene and especially if I
| | 00:52 | turned on Final Gather,
we wouldn't even see it at all.
| | 00:55 | And yet it still being calculated and
that's going to slow our scene down.
| | 00:59 | So, you might need to do this.
| | 01:00 | You might need to on a per light basis
exclude certain objects from casting shadows.
| | 01:07 | So, that's what I'm going to do now.
| | 01:09 | So, for the track light what I want to
do is I want to tell this light to ignore
| | 01:13 | the lampshade so that the lampshade
will not cast a shadow on the wall.
| | 01:17 | So I'll go over to the Modify panel and
with my light selected you'll see in the
| | 01:24 | General Parameters, Exclude.
| | 01:26 | So, I can click on that and I can tell
the light to ignore an object for the
| | 01:32 | purposes of Shadow
Casting or Illumination or Both.
| | 01:36 | Well, what I want to do here is I want to say
just ignore it for the basis of Shadow Casting.
| | 01:42 | I still want some light to be cast upon
the lampshade, but I just don't want a
| | 01:46 | shadow on the wall behind the lampshade.
| | 01:49 | So, I'm going to scroll down here and
in fact, I might choose the entire group
| | 01:54 | and a group in here for lampFloorGroup.
| | 01:56 | So, I'll select that and click the
button to send it to the right hand side of
| | 02:01 | the dialog, and now for this light
this lamp group will not cast any shadows
| | 02:08 | anywhere into the scene.
| | 02:11 | So let's do a comparison here.
| | 02:13 | Here's our original with no exclusion,
I'll make a copy of that and then render it
| | 02:21 | with the exclusion enabled.
| | 02:23 | And again, it's a subtle effect, but
you can tell now that we're not getting a
| | 02:28 | shadow over here and that's good,
because again that shadow is not really
| | 02:32 | contributing much to our image
and yet it's being calculated.
| | 02:36 | So it's an unnecessary
calculation that we can do away with.
| | 02:40 | So that's how you can control shadow
casting on a per light basis and exclude
| | 02:46 | certain objects from
participating in shadow casting.
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| Rendering shadow map shadows| 00:00 | If you want to get the benefits of faster
rendered times you can use Shadow Map shadows.
| | 00:06 | However, you will have to adjust some
of the parameters in order to get good results.
| | 00:11 | So right now I've got the standard
default Ray Traced Shadows on my light.
| | 00:16 | So the first thing I'll do is I'll
choose Shadow Map and let's give that a shot.
| | 00:21 | I'll go ahead and render that and see
what we get and the curious thing is that
| | 00:24 | I get no shadows suddenly and this
is something that might bite you.
| | 00:29 | What you'll need to do sometimes with
Shadow Maps is go into the Shadow Map
| | 00:33 | Parameters and play around
with some of these things.
| | 00:36 | Specifically in this case, I'm
having an issue with the Bias parameter.
| | 00:41 | Bias is the distance of the shadow image
away from the shadow receiving surface.
| | 00:48 | It's very nonphysical.
| | 00:50 | It's not like the real world at all.
| | 00:52 | If I reduce the Bias value it's going to
move the shadow relative to the surface.
| | 00:58 | So with a value of 0.1 you'll see we're
getting a partial shadow and partial garbage.
| | 01:03 | Well, you could play around with
this Bias factor all day along but it's
| | 01:07 | actually just quicker and easier to flip
this switch that says Absolute Map Bias.
| | 01:12 | That'll usually cure the disease.
| | 01:15 | All right, so far, so good.
| | 01:17 | So we've got a Shadow Map and by the
way, I do have Final Gather disabled so
| | 01:21 | that we can see the edge
of the shadow very clearly.
| | 01:23 | So if you look closely you'll see that
there's some aliasing here, there's some
| | 01:26 | jagged edges and we need
to cope with that somehow.
| | 01:29 | There are two parameters that deal
with the softness of a Shadow Map.
| | 01:34 | You've got the Size, which is the
resolution in pixels, and you've got the
| | 01:38 | Sample Range, which is a
blur factor that's applied.
| | 01:42 | So to see this most dramatically
I'm going to reduce the size down to
| | 01:45 | something very low.
| | 01:46 | You'd never take it down this low
but just to show what the deal is.
| | 01:51 | So here we go. Reaally bad aliasing on
my shadow edge, because there's just
| | 01:56 | not enough resolution.
| | 01:58 | So, I could increase the Size. If I
wanted really clear, sharp shadows, I can
| | 02:03 | increase the size maybe to like 1024 or
2048 and for efficiency's sake you should
| | 02:09 | use power of 2 values.
| | 02:11 | In other words, 512, 1024, 2048, but
just watch out, because if you go up beyond
| | 02:18 | about 4000 your memory usage
is going to be pretty extreme.
| | 02:22 | The render times will still be fast
but you'll eat through a lot of memory if
| | 02:25 | you've got a high resolution or size.
| | 02:28 | So that's how you'd achieve
a sharp edge to a Shadow Map.
| | 02:32 | If I wanted a blurry edge, I could
reduce this Size down to something like 512,
| | 02:37 | which was the default, and I could
increase the Sample Range, which is just
| | 02:42 | simply a Gaussian blur applied onto the
pixels that constitute the Shadow Map.
| | 02:48 | So higher values mean more blur.
| | 02:50 | So if I set this to something like 20,
which is a lot of blur, we should be able
| | 02:56 | to see some softness to the shadow
here and I can exaggerate that by further
| | 03:01 | reducing the resolution.
| | 03:03 | So a low resolution and a high
Sample Range will get you a softer shadow.
| | 03:08 | However, it's not physically accurate
and it doesn't respect transparency.
| | 03:13 | If you need transparency in your Shadow
Maps then you'll need to use the mental
| | 03:18 | ray Shadow Map, and it works pretty
much to same as the Standard Shadow Map.
| | 03:22 | So those are the parameters to play with.
| | 03:24 | I recommend if you're using mental ray
most of the time, you're going to want
| | 03:28 | to use the Ray Traced Shadows, except if
you've got scenes with a large number of lights.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Rendering raytraced shadows| 00:00 | In most cases, Ray Traced Shadows are
the best choice for mental ray rendering
| | 00:05 | especially for interiors such as this.
| | 00:07 | Let's take a look at controlling them.
| | 00:10 | Right now I've got just a
standard Ray Traced Shadow with the
| | 00:13 | default parameters.
| | 00:15 | I'll go ahead and do a render of that.
| | 00:17 | I've got Final Gather disabled so that we
can see very clearly the edge of the shadow.
| | 00:24 | So right now I've got a Point light
shape and if I want to get soft shadows
| | 00:30 | I'll have to choose anything other than Point.
| | 00:33 | So for an incandescent or compact
fluorescent usually I would choose Sphere and
| | 00:38 | adjust the Radius to let's say 2 inches
and then when I do a rendering I should
| | 00:43 | get soft shadows that are physically accurate.
| | 00:46 | So, the shadow will be sharper here
where the surfaces are closer together and
| | 00:52 | the shadow will be blurrier where
the Shadow Casting and Shadow Receiving
| | 00:57 | surfaces are farther apart from one another.
| | 00:59 | Now the other thing you'll need to play
around with is the Shadow Samples here.
| | 01:04 | So if it were set to 32, which is the
default, you might get some grainy effects here.
| | 01:10 | If you look closely, it's looking pretty grainy.
| | 01:13 | So the higher this value, the less
grain you'll get, but of course, the longer
| | 01:19 | their rendering times.
| | 01:20 | I tend to use a value of 64 in most
cases, especially in ones you've got
| | 01:24 | Final Gather turned on.
| | 01:26 | That'll kind of mask a lot of the graininess.
| | 01:28 | So I'll set that back down to 64.
| | 01:31 | Also you'll note in the rendered frame
window you've got a slider here for Soft
| | 01:36 | Shadows Precision and this is a global
multiplier that will affect all of your
| | 01:42 | lights in your scene and basically if I
set this to, for example, 0.5, then the
| | 01:49 | effective number of Shadow Samples
for any light will be the value in the
| | 01:56 | Shape/Area Shadows rollout times 0.5.
| | 02:00 | So right now if I render this,
the effective result of Shadow Samples will be
| | 02:05 | 64 divided by 2 or 32.
| | 02:08 | So, we're back to getting grainy shadows.
| | 02:13 | So use this carefully because if you
crank this up you could suddenly get
| | 02:19 | extremely super long render times.
| | 02:21 | My advice is to leave it at the
default of 1 and adjust each light's Shadow
| | 02:27 | Samples parameter individually.
| | 02:28 | That's how you control Ray Traced
Shadow parameters and as you see it's lot less
| | 02:33 | to think about than Shadow Maps.
| | 02:35 | But again, the downside of it is you'll
get longer render times. But you know what?
| | 02:40 | That's fine because good quality
rendering is more important than fast.
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|
|
9. Final GatherUnderstanding final gather| 00:00 | Final Gather is a global illumination
technique that simulates the result of
| | 00:06 | light bouncing off of diffused
surfaces or matte finished surfaces.
| | 00:12 | So on the left here you'll see a
rendering with Final Gather disabled.
| | 00:17 | And although we have three lights in this scene,
I've got two track lights and a floor lamp,
| | 00:22 | we get absolutely black shadows in areas that
are not directly illuminated. So that's no good.
| | 00:29 | If we want realistic renderings, we
need some method of calculating the diffuse
| | 00:36 | bounces, which is a form
of indirect illumination.
| | 00:40 | So here on the right, I have Final
Gather enabled and you'll see over here on
| | 00:45 | this wall, although, there is no
direct illumination, there is indirect
| | 00:49 | illumination that's kind of giving us a
little bit of splash on the wall there.
| | 00:53 | Now there are other ways of achieving
indirect illumination, such as Radiosity,
| | 00:59 | which is kind of an old school technique.
| | 01:01 | You can do that with the default
Scanline Renderer but not with mental ray.
| | 01:05 | There is another method of indirect
illumination called Photon Mapping and just
| | 01:11 | to show that to you, I'm going to
open up the Render Setup window.
| | 01:15 | And in the Render Setup window's
Indirect Illumination tab, you'll see there is
| | 01:20 | different sections here, different
rollouts for the different types of
| | 01:24 | indirect illumination.
| | 01:25 | In this course, we're only going to look
at Final Gather because in the words of
| | 01:29 | Autodesk, this is a technique
that's suitable for non-expert users.
| | 01:34 | That's kind of a way of saying
that if you wanted to use these other methods,
| | 01:38 | you'd have to spend quite a
lot of time tweaking it and it's not
| | 01:42 | terribly intuitive.
| | 01:43 | It's more accurate but it's much slower to
render and it takes much longer to setup.
| | 01:50 | So in this course, we're only going to
be looking at Final Gather as a method of
| | 01:54 | indirect illumination.
| | 01:56 | It's less accurate than the other
method, which is Photon Mapping, but it is
| | 02:00 | much easier to setup and it
renders much more quickly.
| | 02:03 | You can adjust some of the basic
parameters from within the Rendered Frame
| | 02:09 | window as you see here, but we're going
to spend some time in the Render Setup
| | 02:14 | window and adjust these settings
to optimize them for each scene.
| | 02:19 | So it's not good enough to
simply flip this up to Low or Medium.
| | 02:24 | You're really going to want to
spend some time adjusting this values.
| | 02:28 | So that's a little bit about how
Final Gather works and what it's for.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting exposure control for final gather| 00:00 | When using Final Gather, you're
probably going to need to adjust the Exposure
| | 00:04 | Control accordingly because when Final
Gather is enabled it's adding more light
| | 00:09 | into the scene and that means you'll
probably need to adjust the exposure.
| | 00:13 | So let's do it side by side here once again.
| | 00:16 | I've got no Final Gather over here and
I'll just turn the Final Gather Precision
| | 00:23 | up to Draft just so we can
kind of get a general sense.
| | 00:27 | Let that render through and having
done that, this area here is subtly but
| | 00:33 | a little bit brighter than it was before.
| | 00:36 | This would be more dramatic if you
have a daylight scene, but generally
| | 00:40 | speaking when Final Gather is enabled,
you're going to need to adjust the
| | 00:44 | Exposure Value accordingly.
| | 00:45 | So I'll just go into the
Environment and Effects dialog, here is a
| | 00:50 | little shortcut to that.
| | 00:52 | Here is my Photographic Exposure
Control and with Final Gather enabled,
| | 00:57 | I probably want to increase my Exposure
Value by maybe a half or a whole number.
| | 01:03 | In this case, it's a pretty subtle
effect so I might just increase this to
| | 01:06 | a value of about 5.5.
| | 01:07 | It's got generally the same look that I
had with Final Gather Disabled, but now
| | 01:13 | I've just got some splash. Cool.
| | 01:15 | So there is one other thing you need to
know about Final Gather and Exposure and
| | 01:20 | that is if you do have any self-
illuminated materials in the scene,
| | 01:25 | they'll actually contribute
to the Final Gather solution.
| | 01:28 | In other words, self-illuminated
materials actually project light into the scene,
| | 01:33 | which doesn't happen with the
standard default Scanline Renderer.
| | 01:38 | So in mental ray with Final Gather,
we get both the blessing and a curse.
| | 01:41 | Illumination from self-illuminated
objects actually projecting light into the
| | 01:45 | scene but we might not want that.
| | 01:48 | Just to show you what that's all
about, I'm going to open up the Material
| | 01:52 | Editor and you'll see I've created a self-
illuminated material here using Arch & Design.
| | 01:58 | We'll be looking at this a little
bit when we talk about backdrops.
| | 02:02 | But for now, I'm just going to
assign this to the lampshade.
| | 02:06 | So we have got the lampshade selected and
I'll just go ahead and assign that material.
| | 02:10 | I'm also going to turn off all my scene
lights by going into Tools > Light Lister.
| | 02:17 | And if you haven't seen this before,
this is really handy because you can turn
| | 02:21 | lights on and off and adjust simple
parameters just all from this one window.
| | 02:26 | That's the Light Lister.
| | 02:27 | So currently my lights are all
turned off and I've got a self-illuminated
| | 02:31 | material applied to the one object, the
lampshade, and let's do a side by side on this again.
| | 02:39 | Here it is with scene lights on and
Final Gather on and then we'll do another
| | 02:44 | render with all the scene lights
turned off and now the lampshade is actually
| | 02:48 | projecting light into the scene.
| | 02:50 | So again, that's a blessing and a curse.
| | 02:52 | You might want that effect but remember
this is not a photometrically calculated effect,
| | 02:57 | so I'm not actually able to get
physically accurate results with this.
| | 03:03 | So it's just a warning to you if you do
have self-illuminated objects you might
| | 03:07 | want to disable the self-illumination.
At the very least you're going to want to
| | 03:12 | adjust the self-illumination accordingly.
| | 03:14 | So as we can see here, we would
probably also need to adjust the Exposure
| | 03:18 | in this case as well.
| | 03:20 | So that's a little bit about adjusting
Exposure Control for use with Final Gather.
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| Setting initial FG point density and rays per FG point| 00:00 | Final Gather settings are very
important to look of your rendering.
| | 00:04 | So we need to spend some time getting
familiar with the nuts and bolts of how
| | 00:08 | Final Gather settings work.
| | 00:11 | So what you see here is a rendering
with just the Draft preset for Final Gather
| | 00:17 | and if you look closely, you'll see
there is a weird circle right here.
| | 00:22 | That's actually a Final Gather point
that's causing issues with our rendering.
| | 00:27 | So we want to go in and tweak
this so that we can clean this up.
| | 00:30 | So I'm going to go into the Render Setup
window to the Indirect Illumination tab
| | 00:36 | and we're going to spend some time
looking at these parameters here.
| | 00:40 | So the first ones we're going to see
here are the Initial Final Gather Point
| | 00:44 | Density and then Rays per Final Gather Point.
| | 00:48 | So the Point Density is the number of
initial points that are sampled here.
| | 00:53 | So in other words, Final
Gather is view dependent.
| | 00:56 | That means that you're going to get
different results to your Final Gather
| | 01:00 | depending upon the view.
| | 01:02 | So it samples the scene from the point
of view of the camera and it goes through
| | 01:07 | and it creates that kind of
mosaic effect that you've seen.
| | 01:10 | The initial sampling detail is
controlled through this setting.
| | 01:15 | So if we go through these different
presets and we can use this slider or we can
| | 01:20 | use the same slider up here, either way.
| | 01:23 | Notice by the way that it
doesn't update down here.
| | 01:26 | But in any event as we go through here,
you'll see these values change and
| | 01:32 | the Draft value here is 0.1 and the
upper end of the range is a value of 4.0.
| | 01:40 | Well, I've never pushed this up to 4.
| | 01:42 | I've never seen a need to do that.
| | 01:45 | I would recommend values more
like between 0.5 and 1 for final
| | 01:52 | production renderings.
| | 01:54 | So for Draft renderings, 0.1 is fine.
| | 02:00 | In lot of cases, I've been able to get away
with a value of 0.5 and that's been okay.
| | 02:06 | At the most, I've ever
set it up to a value of 1.
| | 02:08 | I'm not changing the other parameters
just yet, but let's see what just changing
| | 02:14 | that from 0.1 to 1.0 accomplishes.
| | 02:18 | Let's make a copy of that and render.
| | 02:24 | So we're getting better accuracy now.
| | 02:26 | So you see instead of this big splash
over here, this big dot, we're seeing lots
| | 02:33 | of little dots that are
kind of superimposed here.
| | 02:36 | So that's just one part of the equation here.
| | 02:38 | We're going to need to adjust some of the
other parameters to get a good result as well.
| | 02:44 | So one of those other parameters
is the Rays per Final Gather Point.
| | 02:49 | So what that is, is for each sample on
the view here, how many rays do we want
| | 02:56 | to generate to sample the
environment around that particular location.
| | 03:01 | So this one, I would try to keep this low
once again. A value of 50 is usually too low.
| | 03:09 | I found a value ranging from about
50 to about 200 to be a good range.
| | 03:15 | Let's try splitting the difference
between those and setting this to about 100.
| | 03:20 | In general, the presets here are not
terribly useful and they tend to be too high
| | 03:26 | and you can usually get
away with a lot lower settings.
| | 03:29 | So now you'll see we're getting more
samples and more sort of splash as a
| | 03:36 | result of those samples.
| | 03:38 | If I increase this up to 200 and re-render,
it's going to sort of spread out and
| | 03:47 | as I increase that value, we're
going to get more accurate renderings.
| | 03:52 | Now we still got a lot of garbage in here
but we're going to deal with that as well.
| | 03:57 | So again, Initial Point Density.
I would range that between 0.1 and 1.0 and
| | 04:05 | Rays per Final Gather point, I would
range between about 50 and 200.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting interpolation and diffuse bounces| 00:00 | In addition to the Initial Point
Density and Rays per Final Gather Point,
| | 00:05 | there are two other very important
parameters that you're going to need to adjust.
| | 00:09 | First of all, Interpolate Over
Number of Final Gather Points.
| | 00:14 | That's a bit of a mouthful.
| | 00:15 | But what this does is it applies a
smoothing factor to your rendering by
| | 00:20 | essentially blending all these points
together and the number here determines
| | 00:25 | how many of these points are
going to be blended with other points.
| | 00:30 | So a good range of this is usually once
again between about 50 and about 200, so
| | 00:36 | this value of 30 is definitely way too low.
| | 00:39 | So I'm going to set this to let's try
100 and do a render and see how that
| | 00:45 | softens up our scene.
| | 00:46 | So as you can see, by increasing
the interpolation from 30 to 100 we're
| | 00:54 | getting a much softer look here and
we're almost losing that kind of blotchy
| | 00:58 | look that we were getting.
| | 01:01 | So we can increase this up to
maybe about 200 and try again.
| | 01:06 | So now you'll see we're getting a much
softer look to the rendering and these
| | 01:12 | settings are pretty good for this
particular scene and this particular view.
| | 01:16 | But as always your mileage may vary.
| | 01:18 | So now that you understand how these
work, you can kind of play with this and
| | 01:21 | get it tuned so that it looks good.
| | 01:24 | The last thing, I want to mention in this
dialog here is the number of Diffuse Bounces.
| | 01:30 | This is an important one because it
determines whether a Final Gather Ray is
| | 01:36 | going to generate additional Final Gather Rays.
| | 01:40 | In other words, with Diffuse Bounces
set to 0, what happens is light hits a
| | 01:45 | surface and then bounces off
to illuminate another surface.
| | 01:49 | So a light ray might hit this wall and then
bounce off to illuminate this other wall here.
| | 01:55 | So that's with the Diffuse Bounces of 0.
| | 01:58 | If I set it to 1, then we're going
to get an additional ray generated.
| | 02:03 | So light might hit this wall, bounce,
hit the other wall and then bounce back.
| | 02:09 | So this number is a bit misleading
because Diffuse Bounces set to 0,
| | 02:15 | you're actually getting one bounce for free.
| | 02:18 | If Diffuse Bounces is set to 1, you're
actually getting two diffused bounces, so
| | 02:23 | that's a bit confusing.
| | 02:24 | But with this set to 1 when I render,
it's going to make my scene immediately brighter.
| | 02:32 | It'll take longer to render of course,
because more calculation is required.
| | 02:38 | So the practice that you want to follow here is
Diffuse Bounces should be set to either 0 or 1.
| | 02:46 | Don't bother increasing it beyond 1
because you won't see an appreciable
| | 02:50 | difference in your rendering and
it's going to just take a lot longer.
| | 02:53 | The higher the number of the diffuse
bounces, the more "physically accurate"
| | 02:58 | the rendering will be.
| | 03:00 | But you won't notice the effect on the
screen and it'll just take longer to render.
| | 03:04 | So again, my advice is Diffuse Bounces
should be set to 0 specially for test renders
| | 03:09 | and then when you're ready to do your final
render turn it up to 1, but no farther than that.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Tuning final gather settings to the scene| 00:00 | Every scene is going to be different.
| | 00:02 | So you are going to need to adjust the
Final Gather settings on a per scene basis.
| | 00:07 | I have adjusted these values to what
it looks pretty good to me here but your
| | 00:12 | mileage is going to vary.
| | 00:13 | If you have a different scene or a
different lighting setup or even just a
| | 00:17 | different camera view, those
values might need to be adjusted.
| | 00:22 | The general rule of thumb of course is
you want those values to be as low as
| | 00:26 | you can get away with because higher settings
do not necessarily result in better renderings.
| | 00:32 | They might be more 'physically accurate'
but your viewer may not be able to tell
| | 00:38 | the difference and the
render times may be excessive.
| | 00:42 | So basically you want to optimize
this so you will get a render time that's
| | 00:47 | acceptable and still get
a decent looking render.
| | 00:50 | This method works pretty well for still images.
| | 00:53 | For animations, it's much more
complicated. Because Final Gather is view-dependent,
| | 01:00 | if the view changes, then the Final
Gather setting is going to change and in a
| | 01:06 | camera walk-through, for example,
the view changes on every frame.
| | 01:09 | So the end-result is you
get a lot of flickering.
| | 01:12 | Now there are ways to deal with this,
but for now, you want to just leave it at,
| | 01:17 | if you are doing an animation, you are
going to need to have much higher Final
| | 01:21 | Gather settings, and that's going to
result in much longer render times.
| | 01:26 | So what I like to do for animations is
actually I don't use Final Gather at all.
| | 01:32 | I use a different methodology called
Ambient Occlusion and we are going to look
| | 01:36 | at that in a separate chapter.
| | 01:38 | Ambient Occlusion is an alternate
method for simulating this indirect
| | 01:43 | illumination but it's not view-dependent.
| | 01:47 | So it doesn't change when the camera changes.
| | 01:49 | So we are going to look
at Ambient Occlusion later.
| | 01:52 | For now, just be aware that Final
Gather is very good for stills but for
| | 01:57 | animations, you are going to have
to jump through a lot of extra hoops.
| | 02:00 | It's going to take a really long time
to render and frankly, I would advise not
| | 02:05 | using Final Gather for animations at all.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Controlling object properties for final gather| 00:00 | Although we may be striving for
physical accuracy in our renderings,
| | 00:04 | a lot of times that's really not practical.
| | 00:07 | We might be facing extremely long
render times or we might be trying to achieve
| | 00:13 | a certain artistic effect, which means
we are going to have to cheat and we can
| | 00:17 | cheat with Final Gather as well.
| | 00:19 | Specifically, we can determine
whether an object will participate in Final
| | 00:23 | Gather or not and there are
two main considerations there.
| | 00:27 | Will the surface receive
illumination from the Final Gather?
| | 00:31 | Or will the surface generate illumination
to contribute to the Final Gather solution?
| | 00:37 | Both of those are controlled
through the Object Properties dialog.
| | 00:40 | So I have got my lampshade selected.
I am going to right-click, and go to Object
| | 00:45 | Properties and we've got the
mental ray tab opened here.
| | 00:50 | So you've got the General tab and
then we have got the mental ray tab.
| | 00:53 | Here we've got Final Gather parameters.
| | 00:57 | The first one here determines whether
the surface will generate light or not.
| | 01:04 | So the terminology here is a bit
confusing here but basically this is asking do
| | 01:09 | you want the surface to contribute
to the Final Gather solution or not?
| | 01:14 | Is that going to generate bounce light or not?
| | 01:17 | And the default is Return Object
Color Physically Correct and that's
| | 01:22 | usually what you want.
| | 01:24 | If you want to override that, you can
tell it to just send out black or actually
| | 01:29 | even better, just completely disable it.
| | 01:32 | So this is whether it's going to
generate Final Gather illumination or not and
| | 01:36 | then down here, you've got the
option to not receive illumination.
| | 01:41 | So by default, it is going to receive
illumination and I can turn it off to disable that.
| | 01:47 | So I have got some images rendered
already that we can take a look at.
| | 01:50 | In Max 2010, I can use the Rendering
menu to go to View Image File and I have
| | 01:57 | got some rendered images here already.
| | 01:59 | So in fact, I am just
going to open all of these.
| | 02:01 | I guess I'll have to do them one at a time.
| | 02:06 | So here we have a rendering in which
the lampshade is not participating in
| | 02:10 | Final Gather at all.
| | 02:11 | So the object is not generating
illumination and it's not receiving
| | 02:16 | illumination either.
| | 02:22 | In this case, the object is receiving
illumination but it's not generating any
| | 02:27 | light so it's not
actually putting out any splash.
| | 02:35 | In the third example, it's not
receiving illumination but it is
| | 02:40 | generating illumination.
| | 02:41 | So it's rendering as solid black
because it's not receiving any direct
| | 02:45 | illumination and it's also not
receiving any indirect illumination.
| | 02:49 | But it is, ironically,
actually generating illumination.
| | 02:53 | Now why would we want something like this?
| | 02:55 | Well we might want to put a translucent
shader on the lampshade so that it will
| | 02:59 | be see-through and it will look pretty
because it has light inside it but we
| | 03:05 | might not want it to participate in
receiving Final Gather just for performance
| | 03:09 | optimization in our render times.
| | 03:12 | And then finally I have got an example
in which we have the defaults in which
| | 03:19 | it's actually receiving illumination
and it's also generating illumination.
| | 03:24 | There is one more thing.
| | 03:25 | If you have a self-illuminated material,
once again, it will cast light into the scene.
| | 03:31 | If you use a standard material, you
can't turn that off and it's always going
| | 03:34 | to contribute to the Final Gather
even if you go in and attempt to turn off
| | 03:38 | some of those switches.
| | 03:39 | If you have self-illumination from an
Arch & Design material, however, you get
| | 03:44 | more control and that would be
done through the material editor.
| | 03:47 | So that's how you can control whether a
surface will participate in Final Gather or not.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Optimizing final gather for animations| 00:00 | If you want to use Final Gather for an
animation, you'll have to pay special
| | 00:04 | attention to the settings
in the Render Setup dialog.
| | 00:08 | Later we'll see how to get a fake
effect of bounce light using Ambient
| | 00:13 | Occlusion, which renders much more
quickly but if you are really married to
| | 00:18 | Final Gather, and you want to create
an animation, Max 2010 actually has some
| | 00:23 | cool features that will enable you to do that.
| | 00:26 | So what I have got here in this
scene is a simple moving camera.
| | 00:30 | It's only about 2 seconds long but
that's enough to illustrate the issues that
| | 00:34 | can come up with Final Gather.
| | 00:36 | I have pre-rendered a movie for us to look
at here and this one is called fg_stills.
| | 00:43 | So let's take a look at this.
| | 00:45 | As we play through, you can see that we
are getting flickering in the lighting.
| | 00:50 | Pay special attention to the lampshade
and some of these areas here. As I scrub through,
| | 00:53 | you will see it's flickering pretty badly.
| | 00:59 | Part of the reason why it's flickering
so badly is I have just used the draft
| | 01:03 | preset in order to
illustrate this most dramatically.
| | 01:09 | And I can actually make this a little
bit bigger, maybe double size so we can
| | 01:13 | see that the flickering is pretty severe.
| | 01:20 | Okay, well what you can do with this
to try to prevent this from happening is
| | 01:25 | you can crank up the settings over here
for one thing. That's definitely going to
| | 01:29 | increase your rendering time.
| | 01:31 | So that may not be the best option but
new in Max 2010 is the ability to Project
| | 01:38 | Points From Positions Along Camera Path.
| | 01:42 | Okay what does that mean?
| | 01:43 | Well basically it means that when you
have a moving camera, Max is going to
| | 01:47 | know that and it's going to actually do
multiple Final Gather samplings on the
| | 01:52 | path of the camera.
| | 01:54 | So in this case, it's set to a value
of 9 which means that for each second of
| | 02:00 | animation it's going to do nine
separate samples from nine separate positions
| | 02:06 | of the camera and in fact, that's
going to make a big difference and in fact
| | 02:11 | all I did with my second rendering,
that you are about to see, all I did was
| | 02:16 | activate Project Points From Positions Along
Camera Path and set my number of segments to 9.
| | 02:21 | So we can take a look at that and
let's make this double size as well.
| | 02:29 | Now there is a little bit of grain in
here from the mental ray sampling settings
| | 02:34 | but the flicker from Final
Gather has been pretty well resolved.
| | 02:41 | Pay no attention to some of the grit in here.
| | 02:43 | That's just because of the
low resolution of the rendering.
| | 02:46 | But the point is that we've got pretty
good results with the Final Gather here
| | 02:51 | just by turning on a couple of these switches.
| | 02:53 | However, again I want to say that I
don't recommend that you do this a lot
| | 02:56 | unless you really have to because
the render times can be pretty long.
| | 03:00 | Let's see what this looks like when we
render just so you will get a sense of
| | 03:04 | what to expect from this.
| | 03:05 | So I am going to go into the
Rendered Scene, and I am going to turn on
| | 03:11 | Production rendering, so we will see
several images appear at once and also in
| | 03:16 | my Common tab, I am saving out to a
file so in order for this to really work
| | 03:20 | as a good demonstration, I am just
going to save out to another file.
| | 03:26 | I will call this one fg_anim_2.
| | 03:30 | If I don't have file output then
the demo won't really work as well.
| | 03:33 | So just go ahead and click
Render and this is what you will get.
| | 03:38 | You see we've nine separate Final
Gather images kind of stacked in a grid.
| | 03:45 | So each one of those is from a
different frame number, from a different point
| | 03:49 | in time, a different location along
the camera path and the more of these you have,
| | 03:55 | of course, the higher the accuracy
will be and in terms of temporal or
| | 04:00 | time accuracy, but the more of those that
you have will reduce the Final Gather accuracy.
| | 04:06 | So if you want to have more samples in
time, then you'll probably need to also
| | 04:12 | increase the number of Final Gather points.
| | 04:14 | So I am going to cancel out of that now
that we have seen kind of what that looks like.
| | 04:20 | So again, if we go into Indirect
Illumination, if you use the Divide Camera Path
| | 04:27 | by Number Segments option then you would
probably going to also need to increase
| | 04:31 | the Point Density and it would make
sense to increase it by this value.
| | 04:35 | So I would multiply it to value of
.9 in this case, and just because of the
| | 04:42 | way that 3ds Max handles QuickTime,
I am rendering out to QuickTime movies,
| | 04:46 | I have to actually change the file
name each time to prevent an error
| | 04:51 | message from coming up.
| | 04:54 | So now you will see we are getting
much more accurate Final Gather as well as
| | 04:59 | more samples along the path.
| | 05:03 | In this case, it wasn't really
necessary for me to do that because the result
| | 05:06 | that I got was good enough but in
actual practice in Production you are going
| | 05:11 | to find that you are going
to need to do both of those.
| | 05:13 | You'll have to increase the number of steps
and also the number of Final Gather points.
| | 05:19 | So that's how you can use Final
Gather in conjunction with animations.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
10. Sampling QualityControlling render quality with samples per pixel| 00:00 | Now that we have got a handle on how to
setup photometrics and exposure control
| | 00:04 | in Final Gather for an interior lighting setup,
| | 00:07 | this is a good time for us to
look at mental ray's sampling quality.
| | 00:11 | How do we get the best-
looking images from mental ray?
| | 00:14 | I have got a couple of pre-
rendered images that we can look at.
| | 00:17 | So here is one in which you can see
there is a quite a lot of grain and grit and
| | 00:22 | aliasing in the rendering.
| | 00:24 | How do we get rid of that?
| | 00:25 | I am going to open up the Render Setup
dialog and we are going to take a look at
| | 00:29 | some of these parameters.
| | 00:31 | I'll also open up the rendered frame
window simultaneously so we can kind of compare.
| | 00:37 | The most basic setting here is the
Image Precision Antialiasing slider and
| | 00:43 | when I adjust this you will notice
that the numbers change over here in the
| | 00:48 | Render Setup window.
| | 00:50 | So this is unfortunate but it's a fact
that it's called by two different names.
| | 00:55 | It's called Image Precision
Antialiasing in the rendered frame window and it's
| | 01:00 | called Samples per Pixel
in the Render Setup window.
| | 01:03 | Well Samples per Pixel is
actually more accurate name.
| | 01:07 | What's happening is the renderer is
checking for each pixel to see what is the
| | 01:11 | color of that pixel and that's called a sample.
| | 01:14 | If the renderer does more than one
sample for each pixel, then we'll get a
| | 01:19 | more accurate and it will average the results
among adjacent pixels and smooth everything out.
| | 01:25 | So Samples per Pixel is a much
more accurate way of looking at this.
| | 01:29 | Low values here will result in
glitches and missing thin lines and really
| | 01:34 | pretty yucky stuff.
| | 01:36 | If we look at this rendering
there is some grit in here.
| | 01:39 | This was at a custom setting that I did.
| | 01:42 | I chose a Minimum number of samples of
four and a Maximum of 16 and in a lot of
| | 01:48 | cases, that will be good enough but
in this case because of my reflective
| | 01:51 | materials and everything,
it just wasn't working out.
| | 01:53 | So what I had to do was
increase the Maximum number of samples.
| | 01:58 | So again this is a pretty good
setting for most cases but I am pushing the
| | 02:03 | envelope here in this particular scene.
| | 02:08 | So this is another version in which I have
done a bunch of things to change the rendering.
| | 02:13 | For one thing, I increase the Maximum
to 64 and additionally I set the Glossy
| | 02:21 | Reflection's Precision to two times quality.
| | 02:25 | So remember in Arch & Design, you can
have glossy reflections or different types
| | 02:30 | of reflections. Let's just take a look at
that just quickly to refresh your memory.
| | 02:35 | So in my window frame, I had Glossy
Reflections with the Glossiness set down to
| | 02:41 | 0.4 and I had this switch, Highlights
and FG only, turned off and then we'll get
| | 02:48 | these sateen finish metal reflection
and that's looking really nice but it was
| | 02:53 | taking a really long time to render.
| | 02:55 | So what I ended up doing was enabling
this switch, which basically just turns
| | 03:01 | off the Glossy Reflections, and
you can see the difference here.
| | 03:04 | So it's not quite as beautiful
but it rendered a lot more quickly.
| | 03:07 | So it's helpful for this demonstration.
| | 03:10 | You will also notice the difference
here between there is some grit here and
| | 03:13 | there is no grit here. There is some
aliasing here, but it's been cleaned up
| | 03:18 | here and that was all
through the number of samples.
| | 03:21 | So just by increasing the number of
samples to 64, I got a much better look.
| | 03:26 | Now one unfortunate thing is that 3ds
Max currently doesn't expose any method
| | 03:32 | for overriding the sampling on a
per-object or per material basis.
| | 03:38 | Other programs have implementations
of mental ray that do allow you to, for
| | 03:42 | example, select an object and force it
to have a higher number of samples than
| | 03:47 | other objects in the scene.
| | 03:49 | Unfortunately in 3ds Max, currently
it's a global setting and that's one reason
| | 03:54 | why the render times with mental ray in
3ds Max can be pretty excessive because
| | 03:58 | you can't just fine-tune it on a
per object or per material basis.
| | 04:02 | But in any event, with an
understanding of how Samples per Pixel work,
| | 04:05 | I think you will be able to get pretty
good renderings and hopefully not have
| | 04:09 | to wait too long for them.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding spatial contrast settings| 00:00 | Let's dig a little bit deeper
into the Sampling Quality settings.
| | 00:04 | So, as we've seen we can set a Minimum
and Maximum value of Samples per Pixel.
| | 00:09 | So, for each pixel, we can
take more or a fewer samples.
| | 00:13 | Then the question becomes, how does the
renderer decide whether to sample that
| | 00:18 | pixel more times or to recursively re-sample.
| | 00:23 | It's done based upon
this Spatial Contrast value.
| | 00:26 | What we want to achieve is we want fewer
samples in flat areas of color and more
| | 00:32 | samples in areas where there's great
amount of detail, whether it's a texture or
| | 00:37 | glossy highlights or what have you.
| | 00:39 | So, this Spatial Contrast
setting let's set a threshold.
| | 00:42 | Higher contrasty areas should be sampled more
and less contrasty area should be sampled less.
| | 00:49 | To set these values, it's
a little bit non-intuitive.
| | 00:52 | Lower values mean more samples;
| | 00:56 | higher values mean fewer samples.
| | 00:59 | So, the default is 0.05. A useful
range of values here is somewhere between
| | 01:05 | maybe 0.01 to 0.1, something like that.
| | 01:11 | So, I could set this to maybe like
0.01 on all of these red, green, blue and
| | 01:16 | alpha channels and this would
dramatically increase my render time because
| | 01:21 | essentially what would happen is we would be
sampling nearly 64 times on almost all pixels.
| | 01:28 | If I set this to a value of 0 on all
channels, then I would get 64 samples
| | 01:35 | on every pixel and that wouldn't be
a good idea because our render time
| | 01:39 | would be extreme and we wouldn't get the
benefits of sampling these flat areas fewer times.
| | 01:46 | So you would never set this to 0.
| | 01:49 | If I set it to maybe 0.1, then I run
the risk of not having enough accuracy and
| | 01:56 | I'll probably end up under sampling the scene.
| | 01:59 | So, again the default is 0.05 and
that's a pretty good sort of happy medium.
| | 02:06 | In actual practice, I would to tend
to set this something more like 0.07.
| | 02:10 | That will basically give me almost
the same result as 0.05 but speed up the
| | 02:17 | rendering just a little bit.
| | 02:19 | As always your mileage may vary and
it's going to be different for every scene
| | 02:23 | but now you know how to adjust
it in order to get good results.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using filter settings to apply blur for anti-aliasing| 00:00 | Filtering is a method whereby
aliasing or jaggy edges in a rendering can be
| | 00:06 | smoothed out after the samples are taken.
| | 00:10 | So, in the Sampling Quality, of course,
we can set our number of Samples per
| | 00:13 | Pixel but then after the samples are
taken, then a post-process can be run in
| | 00:19 | order to smooth out any jagged edges
on reflection and sharp corners etc.
| | 00:23 | Now, filtration will not work at all,
if your Samples per Pixel is below 1/4th.
| | 00:30 | So, you need to have a value of at
least 1/4th and your production renders are
| | 00:34 | never going to be that low anyway.
| | 00:35 | You're going to have at the bare minimum
1 but probably more like 4 Samples per Pixel.
| | 00:40 | So, there's different types of
filtration and each one has a different look.
| | 00:46 | So this standard Box filter is kind of
the default with a Width and Height of 1
| | 00:51 | and that's measured in pixels.
| | 00:52 | So basically each pixel will
be blended with it's neighbor.
| | 00:56 | So, this one was rendered here with the
setting of the Lanczos filter with the
| | 01:02 | Width and Height of 4 and this
is the result that we've got.
| | 01:06 | So, in order to just sort of
illustrate this more clearly, I'm going to set
| | 01:10 | my number of samples down very low and
I'll just go back to the standard Box filter.
| | 01:16 | So, I have just only got 1 Sample per Pixel.
| | 01:21 | And it should look pretty jagged and
then we can increase the Filtration to add
| | 01:29 | more softness to it.
| | 01:32 | This is just for the purposes of
illustration to show you how it works.
| | 01:42 | So, as you'll see with 1 Sample per
Pixel, we're getting a lot of jagged edges
| | 01:50 | everywhere all through here.
| | 01:54 | Now I can increase the filtration and
what this is going to do is essentially
| | 01:58 | apply a blur to everything.
| | 02:05 | In actual practice in production,
we probably wouldn't use these settings.
| | 02:09 | This is just to show you how filtration works.
| | 02:14 | Typically again you would have a
Minimum Samples of 4, Maximum of 16 or 64 and
| | 02:21 | then you can give that filtration a
little bit higher than 1 but you wouldn't
| | 02:25 | usually turn up as far as 4 for the
Box filter because now it's looking as if
| | 02:31 | our lens is out of focus on the camera.
| | 02:35 | So, I would experiment with either of
Mitchell or Lanczos filter and see what
| | 02:39 | they do because they're going probably
be a little bit more sophisticated than
| | 02:43 | the default Box filter and it'll give
you a little bit better contrast and your
| | 02:47 | images will pop a little bit better.
| | 02:50 | So, once again just to take a look at
the end results, I have got this Mitchell
| | 02:58 | filter here set to value of 4 and 4
and I've got 1 Minimum Sample and 16
| | 03:09 | Maximum Samples and this is actually,
probably, the best yet we've seen for
| | 03:13 | this particular scene.
| | 03:15 | So play around with the filtration.
Don't crank it up too high but use it in
| | 03:20 | conjunction with the Samples per Pixel
and Spatial Contrast to try to get a good
| | 03:24 | rendering that doesn't
take 100 years to complete.
| | 03:27 | So, that's it for the
Sampling Quality for mental ray.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
11. Exterior DaylightCreating a daylight system| 00:00 | We're going to create exterior
daylight in 3ds Max in mental ray and it's
| | 00:05 | really easy to do this.
| | 00:06 | You can actually just with the few
clicks of your mouse create a physically
| | 00:10 | accurate simulation of daylight at a
certain point in the day, at a certain of
| | 00:16 | the year, at a certain latitude.
| | 00:18 | So, it's pretty incredible.
| | 00:20 | So, let's go ahead and get started with this.
| | 00:22 | I'm going to go to the Create panel and
I want to choose the Systems sub-panel
| | 00:28 | and then within that you'll see
confusingly enough there's a Sunlight system
| | 00:32 | and a Daylight system.
| | 00:33 | What we want the Daylight system
because that set up to be used with mental ray.
| | 00:37 | So I'm going to click Daylight.
| | 00:39 | As soon as I do this, I get a pop-up
asking do I want to turn on Exposure Control?
| | 00:44 | Yes. I want mr photographic
Exposure Control enabled.
| | 00:47 | Let's go ahead and click Yes.
| | 00:49 | Then I'll go to my top-view and what I
want to do is click and hold the mouse
| | 00:54 | button down to set the
size of this compass rose.
| | 00:57 | That's just an icon that is
convenient in the viewport.
| | 01:00 | It doesn't matter where it is or how big it is.
| | 01:03 | That won't affect the lighting.
| | 01:04 | I'll just put over here where it's convenient.
| | 01:07 | Then release the mouse button and drag
out to set the so-called Orbital Scale.
| | 01:12 | You can see on a right hand side of
my screen, the Orbital Scale value is
| | 01:17 | changing and again this
doesn't affect the lighting.
| | 01:20 | We just want to set that so that's convenient
so we can see what we're doing in the viewport.
| | 01:25 | And then when I've got what I want,
I'll click the mouse again and that'll
| | 01:28 | finish creating the Daylight system.
| | 01:30 | Then I want to right-click to exit
Creation Mode because I certainly don't want
| | 01:36 | to accidentally create more Daylight
systems, there's only one Sun on the earth.
| | 01:40 | So, I've got my Daylight system created.
| | 01:42 | I can move it around by selecting the
compass rose and dragging matte but this
| | 01:47 | won't affect the lighting.
| | 01:48 | That's just purely visual for me so
that I can keep that separate for my
| | 01:53 | geometry, so that I don't
get confuse by all of this.
| | 01:56 | So, we've created the Daylight system and next
we'll look at adjusting the location, date, and time.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting the location, date, and time from the Motion panel| 00:00 | Now, we're going to set the location,
date and time for the Daylight system.
| | 00:04 | To do so, I want to select the Daylight
system's head and I want to go to the Motion panel.
| | 00:11 | That looks like a little wheel here.
| | 00:13 | So click on Motion and now I've got
the ability to set the Date, Time and
| | 00:18 | Location, excellent.
| | 00:20 | So, San Francisco, California, sure,
how about October 31st 2009 and I can set
| | 00:31 | the hour and minutes as well, so play
around with that and it's physically
| | 00:37 | accurate, pretty cool.
| | 00:42 | Let's orbit it around in here so
we can kind of see what's going on.
| | 00:46 | The assumption here is that North in
your scene is in the positive Y-direction,
| | 00:51 | so you will see that in the compass rose,
North is going up in the top-view and
| | 00:57 | that's in positive Y.
| | 00:59 | So, it's pretty important that
you do follow that convention.
| | 01:02 | If you're plan is set up in some other
direction, you're either going to need
| | 01:06 | to rotate your geometry so that it's
facing in the correct direction as it
| | 01:10 | would in the real world or you can
cheat it actually by adjusting the rotation
| | 01:17 | of the compass rose.
| | 01:18 | So that can be accomplished by going
down here where it says North Direction and
| | 01:23 | set that to some other
direction like 90 degrees.
| | 01:27 | And now North is going to be facing the
different way but that's kind of cheating.
| | 01:34 | It's better to have your plan set up
correctly to begin with. Set that back to 0.
| | 01:39 | So, we've got San Francisco as our current
location but we could change it to whatever.
| | 01:43 | I can set the Latitude and Longitude
or I can just click on its Get Location
| | 01:48 | button and this is pretty cool
because I can just click anywhere.
| | 01:51 | Say that I want it to be New
York City or something like that.
| | 01:56 | I can just click and it will give the
a list of the most populated areas and
| | 02:03 | I can go, of course, to different
Continents and so on but I'm happy with San
| | 02:07 | Francisco, so I'm going to leave at that.
| | 02:10 | So, we've set our Date and Time.
| | 02:11 | Let's make this about 5 PM, so we'll see
some light coming in through the windows here.
| | 02:16 | Let's give it maybe 4 PM or
1600 hrs in military time.
| | 02:23 | I want to look at this
from my front view as well.
| | 02:28 | So, I'm going press F, because I want
to get a reality check, and hit Z to zoom
| | 02:31 | out and make sure that obviously my
Daylight system is not below the horizon.
| | 02:35 | In other words, I don't want to see situation
like this where at 6 PM the sun is already set.
| | 02:43 | So, let's set it to 4 PM.
| | 02:47 | So, we've got our Daylight system's
position, date and time and North direction
| | 02:54 | and all this stuff sorted out and we're
ready to go ahead and play around with
| | 02:59 | the parameters for Daylight itself.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Choosing mr sun and mr sky from the Modify panel| 00:00 | We've set the parameters for the
Daylight system in the Motion panel and next
| | 00:04 | we want to adjust some parameters for
the sun and the sky, and those are found
| | 00:10 | in the Modify panel.
| | 00:11 | So with the Daylight system's head
selected, I'll go to the Modify panel and
| | 00:16 | you will see here Daylight Parameters.
| | 00:19 | The daylighting has two components.
| | 00:21 | It's got direct light from the sun, and
ambient light from the sky, and we can
| | 00:26 | adjust those separately.
| | 00:27 | Now right now, 3ds Max has chosen mr
Sun and mr Sky for me but you'll see here
| | 00:35 | they are different types.
| | 00:37 | With mental ray of course, we always
want to have mr Sun and mr Sky chosen
| | 00:43 | as our Daylight types.
| | 00:45 | You will note also that
shadows are turned on by default.
| | 00:49 | If we look at the Sun here, Shadows
are on, and of course, we want to have
| | 00:54 | Shadows turned on, and we've got a
softness factor here. I would tend to leave
| | 00:59 | this at 1, because it's going to
give you the most accurate results.
| | 01:02 | But if you start to see jagged edges
or any problems with your shadows,
| | 01:06 | you might need to increase
the number of samples here.
| | 01:09 | So mr Sky has already been created here.
| | 01:12 | When you choose mr Sky as your Skylight
type, you might be prompted to add a mr
| | 01:19 | Physical Sky Environment Map, and the
answer that you want to give there is yes.
| | 01:24 | That will give you a renderable sky that
you'll actually see in your renderings,
| | 01:30 | and that can be left as it is, or
you can add your own environment later.
| | 01:36 | But it does actually
contribute to the illuminations.
| | 01:39 | So you want to keep that on, and
you'll see that here, mr Sky Advanced
| | 01:44 | Parameters. This has to do with the
actual renderable background that is coming
| | 01:50 | from the mr Physical Sky Environment Map.
| | 01:54 | So we've got our sun and sky in the
scene and next we are going to play around
| | 02:00 | with that Physical Sky Environment Map.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding the mr physical sky environment map| 00:00 | By default, when we choose mr Sky as
our Skylight, 3ds Max creates an mr
| | 00:06 | Physical Sky Environment Map which is
a renderable image which just creates
| | 00:12 | a synthetic sky in ground plane, and an
image of the sun that appears in renderings.
| | 00:17 | We can of course add our own
environment later if desired.
| | 00:21 | So let's take a look at
what we've got right now.
| | 00:23 | So you see mr Sky Advanced Parameters here.
| | 00:27 | These can also be found in the
Rendering > Environment dialog.
| | 00:32 | So you see mr Physical Sky here,
and Use Map is currently enabled.
| | 00:38 | If I want to adjust these a little bit
more deeply, I can go to the Material
| | 00:43 | Editor, press M, and go to an empty slot,
and just drag this mr Physical Sky
| | 00:51 | onto a slot and choose Instance.
| | 00:55 | Then I have got a bunch of parameters here,
like Disk Intensity and so on for the sun.
| | 01:01 | So this is where I can tweak
on some of these parameters.
| | 01:04 | So let's see what we've got.
| | 01:06 | So I'll go to my Perspective View
and do a quick render of this with no
| | 01:10 | final gather or anything.
| | 01:12 | You can see it's very dark.
| | 01:14 | So I am going to need to adjust the
Exposure Value and we'll do this with a
| | 01:19 | little bit more detail in a moment,
but I am just going to quickly set the
| | 01:23 | Exposure Value to 10 because it's 4:00 PM,
and so there is not as much light in the sky.
| | 01:28 | So now you see I've got a
fake sky and a fake ground plane.
| | 01:34 | I haven't really done anything
with the exposure yet and so the color
| | 01:38 | temperature isn't right.
| | 01:39 | But we've got something on the screen.
| | 01:42 | If I orbit around in this Perspective
View, so that I am kind of looking along
| | 01:47 | the line of sight of that head,
I can actually render the sun.
| | 01:55 | Let's go ahead and do that.
| | 01:57 | So the sun is here.
| | 02:00 | It's kind of blasting out because of my
Exposure Value, so I'll bring this up a
| | 02:03 | little bit, and you see we get a sun for free.
| | 02:09 | And again we are probably going to
replace this with our own background later,
| | 02:12 | but that's how mr Physical Sky is able to
create a background for you just automatically.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting exposure value and image control| 00:00 | I have adjusted the Exposure Value such
that the view directly into the sun is
| | 00:05 | more or less correctly exposed.
| | 00:07 | But that's not the view
that I actually want to render.
| | 00:10 | What I want to render is
this CameraExterior view.
| | 00:14 | I'll just make sure that's locked, and
I might as well maximize the viewport as
| | 00:19 | well, just highlight and hit Alt+W in
order to take up the full-screen. Good!
| | 00:24 | So let's see what we get.
| | 00:25 | Go ahead and click Render.
| | 00:28 | You'll notice that I have my Image
Precision set down really low and Final
| | 00:31 | Gather completely disabled, because I
am just trying to get a basic idea of what
| | 00:36 | the exposure is going to look like here.
| | 00:38 | So clearly it's a bit dim.
| | 00:40 | The exterior daylight, the value of 15
is usually too high, and in this case
| | 00:46 | because it's 4:00 PM, even
a value of 12 is too high.
| | 00:50 | So I might want to bring this down a
little bit, maybe to let's say 10, and
| | 00:55 | then do another render.
| | 00:56 | Okay, that's a little bit better.
| | 00:59 | Now we can also play around with
the Image Control settings here.
| | 01:04 | So the settings I have currently were
appropriate for an interior rendering.
| | 01:10 | But for exterior daylight,
I probably want to play around with this.
| | 01:14 | For example, I can maybe burn the
Highlights a little bit, give that a value of
| | 01:18 | let's say 0.1 and the Midtones, pump
that a little bit to maybe 0.7 and then
| | 01:26 | increase the Contrast and the Shadows
by giving that a value of about 0.1 as well,
| | 01:31 | and then do another
render and see where we are at.
| | 01:35 | So that's overexposed now because of
the burning of a Highlights, so maybe I'll
| | 01:39 | bring my Exposure Value back up
to 11 or 12 to compensate for that.
| | 01:45 | Now in order to get a sense of
whether it's overexposed or not, I can
| | 01:50 | right-click in the rendered frame
window and you'll see in the lower left-hand
| | 01:57 | corner of this pop-up window something
that says Mono and that is telling me
| | 02:03 | the intensity of light or the color of
the pixel directly underneath my cursor.
| | 02:11 | And as I move that around you
will see those numbers change.
| | 02:15 | So when I bring it up here, that's
telling me that in fact the wall here is
| | 02:19 | over-exposed, because it's
clipping out at a value of 1.
| | 02:24 | So looks like I need to bring my
Exposure Value up yet again because of the
| | 02:29 | adjustments I have made to
the Image Control. There we go.
| | 02:34 | So I'll right click again.
| | 02:36 | Basically my brightest part of my
image should be just below a value of 1 and
| | 02:43 | the darkest part of my image
should be just above a value of 0.
| | 02:48 | Now I don't have Final Gather turned on yet.
| | 02:51 | So if I turn Final Gather on
that's going to make a difference.
| | 02:54 | Let's do just a real quick draft rendering
| | 02:57 | with Final Gather enabled and
see if in fact we are clipping.
| | 03:02 | And I think we are okay.
| | 03:03 | We've got a Mono value of 0.93 and then
Shadows got a value just a little bit above 0.
| | 03:12 | So I think this is looking pretty good.
| | 03:14 | I might even decide to bring Exposure Value
| | 03:17 | maybe to a half stop instead of 11.
| | 03:19 | Let's try 11.5, and render that.
| | 03:24 | So we can get it right on the money.
| | 03:28 | Now it looks like that clipped out, so
it's like 12 is what we wanted.
| | 03:31 | Good! We've got a basic exposure and
next we are going to play around with color.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting the exposure whitepoint| 00:00 | We've got a basic exposure setting that
looks pretty good. We are not blasting
| | 00:04 | out our whites and we are
not crushing the blacks.
| | 00:07 | So our Exposure set but the color
looks like you could use some work.
| | 00:11 | It's really quite blue.
| | 00:13 | And remember this is supposed to be
4 P.M., which is an almost completely
| | 00:17 | orange colored light.
| | 00:19 | So the issue here is that the Whitepoint in
my Exposure Control is not set appropriately.
| | 00:25 | Currently it's set to 3200 degrees
Kelvin, which is what you would use for
| | 00:29 | an interior rendering with artificial light
such as incandescent or compact fluorescent.
| | 00:34 | So I am going to set this to 5600
degrees Kelvin, which is emulating the
| | 00:40 | behavior of a camera set to daylight.
| | 00:42 | In other words, you just put
daylight film in the camera.
| | 00:46 | So I am also going to turn up the
render quality a little bit, so this
| | 00:50 | looks little bit better.
| | 00:51 | And you can see here now that
we've got a much more balanced white.
| | 00:58 | Now as I look at this I think that's okay,
but it's supposed to be almost sunset
| | 01:04 | and so really the color of the light
coming in should be a lot more orange.
| | 01:09 | So I can cheat this.
| | 01:11 | Even though this is theoretically
accurate, it doesn't really look right to me.
| | 01:17 | So I can increase the Whitepoint,
which is going to push the rendering
| | 01:20 | more towards orange.
| | 01:22 | So I played around with this previously
and I decided that value about 9300 was
| | 01:27 | going to give me the look
that I want. So there we go.
| | 01:36 | We've got a pretty decent looking
rendering here that sort of artistically
| | 01:40 | represents a look of orange light near sunset.
| | 01:44 | So again you can set it to be "physically accurate"
or you can cheat it in order to get a decent look.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Choosing a sky model| 00:00 | Mental ray in 3ds Max gives you
several different methods for calculating the
| | 00:04 | behavior of the sky.
| | 00:06 | The first thing you need to remember
about the sky is that it doesn't work if
| | 00:11 | Final Gather is turned off.
| | 00:13 | So if Final Gather is turned off, the sky is
not going to contribute anything to the scene.
| | 00:17 | On the right here, you'll see a
rendering with Final Gather turned off and on.
| | 00:23 | Also note that I've changed the time of
day here and the exposure, because this
| | 00:27 | will be a little bit better
example of how the Sky Models work.
| | 00:32 | So with the Daylight head selected, in
the Modify panel you'll see the mr Sky
| | 00:36 | Parameters rollout, and here you
can choose different Sky Models.
| | 00:40 | The default is Haze Driven, and it
derives its intensity from the mr Physical
| | 00:45 | Sky environment map that we saw earlier.
| | 00:48 | So we don't really have much control
over what it does, other than to adjust
| | 00:52 | the amount of Haze.
| | 00:54 | Well, if you want to actually plug in
a value for the brightness of the sky,
| | 00:58 | then we would need to use one of
these other Sky Models, Perez or CIE.
| | 01:03 | Perez I think is little bit better,
because it pays attention to the color of
| | 01:08 | the Haze in the mr Physical Sky environment map.
| | 01:12 | So let's try Perez.
| | 01:14 | Let me clone this one out. So this
is the default Haze Driven Sky Model.
| | 01:21 | Let's do a rendering now with the
Perez Sky Model with the default values.
| | 01:27 | And you'll see it's quite dim.
| | 01:28 | There is very little
illumination coming from the sky at all.
| | 01:32 | So maybe this is a very cloudy day or
almost completely overcast day, where
| | 01:38 | there is almost no light
coming through the clouds.
| | 01:41 | Okay, well that doesn't blend well with
the fact that we have sunlight shadows
| | 01:45 | here, so this is not really
an accurate result in any way.
| | 01:49 | If we look at the values over here, it
turns out that these are really quite low
| | 01:54 | values compare to real-world metrics.
| | 01:57 | So I did a little bit of research
online and I experimented with these values
| | 02:01 | until I got something that looks pretty good.
| | 02:04 | And it turns out that this horizontal
value should be somewhere more in the
| | 02:09 | range of up to 70,000.
| | 02:11 | I am going to try something like
about 30,000 here, and this Direct
| | 02:17 | Illuminance can range up to 100,000, but I am
going to set it to let's say about 50,000 here.
| | 02:24 | That's measured in Lux.
We'll do a rendering, see what we get.
| | 02:31 | So I think that might be
a little bit too intense.
| | 02:34 | Again, I can always measure by right-
clicking in the rendered frame window and
| | 02:39 | see ah yes, am I clipping?
| | 02:40 | Yes, it's clipping, getting
a little bit too much there.
| | 02:43 | So I'll just come back a little bit,
knock that down a little bit and try again.
| | 02:52 | If you do know the actual values of
the sky's illuminance at a certain
| | 02:59 | location, then you can plug those in directly
here and get photometrically accurate results.
| | 03:05 | So here we go.
| | 03:05 | On the left we have the Perez Sky
Model, and on the right we have the
| | 03:10 | Haze Driven Sky Model.
| | 03:12 | And to my eye actually I think the
Perez Sky Model looks a little bit better,
| | 03:16 | but of course, you've got to work on it a
little bit more in order to get good results.
| | 03:20 | There you go. That's how you work
with different Sky Models in mental ray.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Controlling haze| 00:00 | For outdoor scenes in which we can see
a great deal into the distance,
| | 00:04 | we're going to want to add some haze in
order to add some realism to the scene.
| | 00:09 | So currently, I have got
a very large ground plane.
| | 00:12 | It's about a mile on a side, and I have
got an Aerial camera looking down on it.
| | 00:16 | We can see the physical sky in the
background and a little bit of the horizon just here.
| | 00:22 | So we can play around with the haze if
we've got the Haze Driven Sky Model active.
| | 00:27 | Haze ranges from the value of 0, which
is perfectly clear sky, to a value of 15,
| | 00:32 | which is a massive sandstorm.
| | 00:34 | So let's try it at 15, pushing it to its limit.
| | 00:39 | So there you can see it's as if we've
got many fine particles floating in the air,
| | 00:45 | obscuring our view.
| | 00:46 | Of course that's not terribly
realistic, so if we want to more reasonable
| | 00:51 | value, maybe a value
of 5 would be better.
| | 01:00 | So that's fine I guess, but we don't
actually have any real control over the
| | 01:03 | color of the haze here.
| | 01:05 | It's just kind of does what it wants to do.
| | 01:08 | So if we want to have the ability to
set the color and maybe sort of the
| | 01:12 | distance at which the haze is going to
be maximum thickness, then we probably
| | 01:17 | want to instead of using this haze
to add a volume fog effect through the
| | 01:24 | standard 3ds Max rendering
effects. So let's try that.
| | 01:29 | I am going to go into my Rendering
Environment dialog and scrolling down to the
| | 01:35 | bottom, you'll see Atmosphere.
| | 01:39 | And this works in the
standard Scanline Renderer as well.
| | 01:43 | In order to work with mental ray and
Exposure Control, we'll have to play around
| | 01:47 | with a couple of things.
| | 01:48 | But I'll just go ahead and add the
effect now, and what I want is just
| | 01:52 | standard Fog. Click OK.
| | 01:56 | In order for this to work really,
I'm going to have to adjust my Exposure
| | 02:00 | Control, because Exposure Control is
supposed to be physically accurate and
| | 02:05 | the effect that we're going to apply
here is really not physical at all.
| | 02:08 | It's just a rendering trick.
| | 02:11 | So let's see if we see any effect here
currently with just adding the fog and
| | 02:16 | not changing any parameters.
| | 02:17 | Okay, so there you go.
| | 02:20 | We've got a black screen.
| | 02:21 | What we have to do in order for this
to work is we have to play around with
| | 02:26 | the Exposure Control.
| | 02:28 | So you'll see here Physical Scale and
this will come up again if you need to
| | 02:33 | use any of the 3ds Max render
effects that are not physically accurate.
| | 02:38 | You'll need to actually go down here and
choose Unitless and play around with these values.
| | 02:44 | So this is just a purely arbitrary number that
doesn't really have any metric in the real world.
| | 02:51 | So this is going to be one of those
situations where you've got to do a
| | 02:54 | rendering, see what it looks like,
adjust the value, do another rendering,
| | 02:59 | lather, rinse, repeat.
| | 03:00 | So I've already played around with
this a little bit, and I learned that my
| | 03:04 | value here needs to be very high in
order to get the effect that I want.
| | 03:08 | I am going to try a value of about 30,000.
| | 03:16 | So now I've got Fog, and it's actually working.
| | 03:19 | So I'm going to scroll down here and
I've got the color of the Fog, and then
| | 03:24 | I've also got the Near % and Far %,
and this is going to give me the ability
| | 03:31 | to get different looks.
| | 03:32 | So let's try maybe a Far % of 10 and we'll
leave this at White and see what we get.
| | 03:47 | At the Far distance, we've got 10% fog,
and this also interacts with the camera.
| | 03:54 | So if I choose a camera,
I've got Environment Ranges here.
| | 03:59 | So I can set my Far Range to let's say
2,000 feet, and then let's try increasing
| | 04:08 | that Far % value to about
50% and see what we get.
| | 04:16 | So now this is giving me much more
control than I had with just adjusting
| | 04:21 | that one Haze parameter.
| | 04:23 | And I could go in here and I could
say I want my Fog to be orange or blue.
| | 04:30 | This will give me atmospheric perspective.
| | 04:32 | There are other ways of doing this too,
but I like this way of doing it because
| | 04:36 | it's going to give me the most control.
| | 04:37 | So I could set my Exponential value.
That's going to cause it to fall off
| | 04:42 | exponentially, and I can
also adjust my For Range.
| | 04:46 | Maybe set that to
4,000 feet, and do another render.
| | 05:00 | So this is how I prefer to use 3ds
Max to get these non-physical effects,
| | 05:05 | because again, I get full control over it.
| | 05:07 | If I wanted to do completely
unrealistic looks, I can do that too.
| | 05:13 | Kind of have an alien landscape with green
fog and a green sky. And there you go.
| | 05:23 | That's how we can use either Haze or
standard Fog to get atmospheric effects.
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| Working with mr sky advanced parameters| 00:00 | We've seen how to create haze either
just by adjusting the Haze parameter or
| | 00:06 | through the old-school technique of using
standard Fog based upon distance from the camera.
| | 00:12 | But we can also play around with
the Advanced Parameters of mr Sky.
| | 00:18 | Most specifically we've got
the Red/Blue Tint, just here.
| | 00:23 | So we've got a nice rendering here of a sunset.
| | 00:27 | If we wanted to have the redder sky,
we can just push this towards red.
| | 00:32 | So positive values for this Red/Blue
Tint will send the sky color towards red.
| | 00:38 | So with a value of 1,
we should get a much redder scene here.
| | 00:42 | Okay, so we've got a really,
really quite orange looking rendering.
| | 00:49 | If we push this towards
negative values that's going to bluer.
| | 00:53 | So if we give it a -1 and do a
rendering it should be quite a lot more blue.
| | 01:01 | Usually we can also play with
the Saturation, as you can see here.
| | 01:04 | I'll set it back to 0 to neutral.
| | 01:08 | Another really nice thing that we
can do is use Aerial Perspective.
| | 01:15 | So Aerial Perspective is the effect
that objects in the distance appear more blue,
| | 01:20 | because of haze in the air.
| | 01:22 | Now this is maybe a little bit confusing
because Aerial Perspective will have an
| | 01:28 | effect even if Haze is completely turned off.
| | 01:32 | So Aerial Perspective is on by default
and it has a visibility of something in
| | 01:37 | the neighborhood of 30,000 feet.
| | 01:40 | And what this is actually saying is at
a distance of 30,000 feet, we will get
| | 01:45 | approximately 10% haze.
| | 01:48 | If you want 100% haze, then you
would be completely occluding the view.
| | 01:52 | Well, 30,000 is usually too high.
| | 01:55 | So I'm going to bring this
quite a lot down. Maybe 5,000.
| | 01:59 | So at about a distance of about a mile we'll
have 10% haze, if the Haze value is set to 0.
| | 02:07 | So this is kind of strange.
| | 02:09 | Haze is set to 0, but if Aerial
Perspective is on, then we'll still get haze.
| | 02:20 | Remember that I modeled my plane to be
about 1 mile square, so we're getting
| | 02:25 | just a little bit of haze there now.
| | 02:27 | So if I want to make that more dramatic I can
set this to a value of let's say 1,000 feet.
| | 02:40 | Very cool. And remember of course
that you can also play around with the
| | 02:44 | parameters of mr Sky by going to
the Environment dialog and opening up
| | 02:52 | the Material Editor and dragging
the map into a slot on the Material
| | 02:57 | Editor and choosing Instance.
| | 02:59 | And in fact here you can actually go
in and create maps for your ground plane
| | 03:04 | or for the color of the haze and so on.
| | 03:08 | So you can have a lot of fun with this.
| | 03:10 | You can even map this Red/Blue Tint
factor and those are just a few things
| | 03:16 | you can play around with.
| | 03:17 | But the mr Physical Sky obviously gives
you very good results, very quickly,
| | 03:22 | if you don't have time to
create your own environments.
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|
|
12. Interior DaylightUnderstanding mr sky portals| 00:00 | Now we're going to embark on an
exploration of interior daylight.
| | 00:05 | So we have natural light coming through
the window here, through these sliding
| | 00:08 | glass doors and splashing on the walls.
| | 00:11 | We've got just Draft Final Gather,
and it's creating a little bit of
| | 00:15 | ambient light in the room.
| | 00:17 | Well, the first thing you need to know
with daylight for interiors is that the
| | 00:21 | Exposure Value is going
to need to be a lot lower.
| | 00:24 | So for exterior daylight, Exposure
Value is going to range between maybe 10 to
| | 00:29 | 15, but for interiors it's going to
range more between maybe 5 to 10, or even
| | 00:36 | lower than that. Depending upon the
time of day you may need to open the iris
| | 00:40 | more by reducing the
Exposure Value even further.
| | 00:43 | Currently I've got an Exposure Value of 8.
| | 00:46 | You may notice when we start working
with this and trying to get good results
| | 00:52 | that the exterior environment might get
blasted out and may be too bright, and
| | 00:57 | this is actually problem in the real world too.
| | 01:01 | When film shoot sometimes it's
necessary for the lighting people to actually
| | 01:04 | cover the windows with neutral density
gels, or even colored gels in order to
| | 01:09 | control the light coming in from outside.
| | 01:12 | So we can adjust this later if we need to.
| | 01:15 | For now, I am just going to
leave the Exposure Value where it is.
| | 01:17 | Let's talk a little bit
about how mr Sky actually works.
| | 01:22 | It's an all-over illumination.
| | 01:24 | So the sky is actually coming from
everywhere and it's sending light in all
| | 01:29 | directions, and that's not really well
suited to interiors, because the effect
| | 01:33 | that we're trying to achieve is the
light coming from the sky through the
| | 01:38 | windows and through these open portals.
| | 01:41 | So there is a way to achieve this in
mental ray and it's called the mr Sky Portal
| | 01:46 | and it acts like an area light that
you just place over the window, which
| | 01:50 | focuses the skylight
through the window or open door.
| | 01:54 | So you need that in order to get
good results with interior daylight.
| | 01:59 | So Sky Portals are not optional.
| | 02:01 | You actually have to use them
in order to get good results.
| | 02:04 | Just one caveat around that.
| | 02:06 | Very, very large windows such as
entire glass walls in modern high-rise
| | 02:11 | buildings might not need Sky
Portals at all, because Sky Portals are
| | 02:16 | designed for just that.
| | 02:17 | A portal rather than an
entire huge wall of glass.
| | 02:20 | And the Sky Portals will also slow
down your rendering, just like every other
| | 02:25 | feature that we've talked about so far.
| | 02:27 | So if you can get away with not using
the Sky Portals then you should, but
| | 02:31 | certainly in a case like
this we definitely need them.
| | 02:34 | So that's the idea behind mr Sky Portals.
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| Creating mr sky portals| 00:00 | Let's create mr Sky Portals to focus
the light coming from the mr physical sky
| | 00:06 | into our interior space.
| | 00:08 | We need to add portals for all windows,
skylights and open exterior doorways,
| | 00:14 | basically any location where light
is able to enter our interior space.
| | 00:19 | So I'll go to the Create panel and go
for Lights and we've got Photometric as a
| | 00:24 | default and here we go, mr Sky Portal.
| | 00:27 | I want to create this in my left view
in this case, so I'll maximize that with
| | 00:32 | Alt+W and what I want to do is drag out
the portals so that it's just a little
| | 00:37 | bit larger than the window.
| | 00:41 | So click and hold the mouse and drag
that and release when it's just a little
| | 00:46 | bit bigger than the window.
| | 00:47 | I've also got another smaller window
over here in the space which is the
| | 00:53 | bathroom attached to the living room, so
I am going to go ahead and draw another
| | 00:57 | sky portal there as well, and when I
finish creating portals, I'll right-click.
| | 01:02 | Next I want to go to the top view and
move them into position, so hit Alt+W
| | 01:07 | once again, go to top view, Alt+W once
again, grab these two portals and you
| | 01:15 | want to move them so that they are just
outside the windows, just a few inches
| | 01:20 | outside the window.
| | 01:23 | You also want to make sure that the
arrows are pointing inward. So, that's critical.
| | 01:28 | If it's pointing outward, then you're
going to need to rotate it or you could
| | 01:33 | also go into the Modify panel and flip this
switch, which says Flip Light Flux Direction.
| | 01:40 | Either way you just want to make sure
that those portals are a little bit bigger
| | 01:44 | than the window and just a
few inches outside the window.
| | 01:49 | Now if your portals are not quite
the right size, then don't scale them.
| | 01:54 | That's not going to give you the
result that you want. Instead what you want
| | 01:57 | to do is select it, go to the Modify panel and
adjust the Dimensions in the parameters here.
| | 02:03 | That's how you create and
position mr Sky Portals.
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| Controlling mr sky portal shadows| 00:00 | Now we've created and positioned the
mr Sky Portals and we can take a look at
| | 00:05 | the results in a full rendering.
| | 00:08 | So here it is without the Sky Portals.
| | 00:10 | I am going to go ahead and clone that
Rendered Frame window and I'll just use
| | 00:14 | the same settings, just Draft precision
to Final Gather, and Exposure Value of 8.
| | 00:22 | Now my Image Control settings are still
at the default, so I might want to play
| | 00:26 | around with those too but let's just see
what we get with the Sky Portals added.
| | 00:35 | Okay, so if we compare these two renderings,
| | 00:38 | on the right no Sky Portals and on the
left we have two Sky Portals, one for the
| | 00:44 | sliding glass door and
one for the bathroom window.
| | 00:47 | So you can see that the scene is
considerably brighter, once we've added those
| | 00:51 | portals and that means we might need to
adjust the Exposure Value accordingly.
| | 00:57 | I think generally this is maybe a
little bit too dark but our Final Gather is
| | 01:01 | only set to Draft, so let's try
increasing that to let's say Medium precision
| | 01:07 | and do another rendering.
| | 01:09 | So here's the result, we've got with
the Final Gather precision of Medium.
| | 01:13 | I think we can probably adjust this and
make it better because it's a little bit
| | 01:16 | blotchy, so that's one thing to consider.
| | 01:19 | We've also got our Exposure Value.
Maybe we want to brighten this up a little
| | 01:22 | bit and then there's yet another
consideration which is this graininess going on here.
| | 01:27 | So we can deal with each one of these.
| | 01:29 | First, I am going to go to the Render
Setup and Indirect Illumination.
| | 01:35 | Play around with these Final Gather values.
| | 01:38 | I am going to try 0.5, and number of
rays, we'll set to 100 and Interpolation,
| | 01:44 | I'll set to say 150.
| | 01:47 | Diffuse Bounces set to 1 and that's good.
| | 01:51 | And you know what, I'll go into my
Exposure as well and I am going to set
| | 01:57 | these to sort of more neutral values
because I am thinking that's a little bit
| | 02:02 | too contrasty. And then having done that,
I'll probably want to play around with Exposure.
| | 02:09 | Maybe bring this down to 7 or so.
| | 02:11 | All right, so I think we're good to go
on the Final Gather and Exposure,.
| | 02:19 | Let's just do another quick checkup on
this and we'll do another rendering.
| | 02:23 | All right so far so good. I think our
Final Gather is looking a lot better.
| | 02:30 | We don't have that blotchiness here,
especially because I have increase the Interpolation.
| | 02:35 | I should probably also reduced the
Exposure Value because this is looking a bit dark,
| | 02:39 | so let's try a value of 5 and
then finally the graininess here really
| | 02:46 | needs to be dealt with.
| | 02:48 | This is an issue that
comes up with the Sky Portals.
| | 02:51 | They are casting their own shadows here,
so I want to go into the Modify panel
| | 02:58 | for the Sky Portals.
| | 02:59 | So I am going to select the first Sky
Portal, which is the one that's outside
| | 03:06 | the sliding glass door, and I want to
play around with the Shadow Samples.
| | 03:12 | The default here 16 is never enough.
| | 03:15 | You're usually going to put this up to
64 or perhaps even higher, and that is
| | 03:20 | actually probably the number one way to
slow down your rendering is to use this
| | 03:24 | Sky Portals Shadows with a high Shadow Samples.
| | 03:27 | We really don't have much choice because
you've got to get rid of this graininess.
| | 03:31 | However, you should be selective about
it. Because for example, I've got another
| | 03:34 | portal over here for the bathroom
window but it's so far in the distance that
| | 03:37 | we can't really see the effect of the
shadow, so I might as well just turn them off.
| | 03:41 | So I am going to select that portal
and actually just check the Shadows off
| | 03:46 | completely on the other Sky Portal because it's
not really contributing much to the rendering.
| | 03:52 | So we've got some new settings here.
We've adjusted the Exposure and we played
| | 03:56 | around with the Shadow Samples
so we'll give this another go.
| | 03:59 | All right, I am pretty happy with the
look of this in terms of lighting.
| | 04:05 | There are still some aliasing issues that I
could help out by increasing the number of
| | 04:11 | samples per pixel or the Image
Precision setting here but overall I think we've
| | 04:16 | got pretty good results here.
| | 04:17 | While you are testing, you might want
to actually shut off the Shadows for the
| | 04:21 | Sky Portal completely and then turn
them back on again for the final rendering
| | 04:26 | but this will get you started on your
way towards getting excellent looking
| | 04:29 | interior daylight renderings.
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|
|
13. Rendering Environment Backdrops in 3ds MaxUnderstanding the pros and cons of environment mapping| 00:00 | We basically got our interiors set up
and got some good lighting in here but if
| | 00:05 | we look at the rendered frame you'll
see we still got the basic mr Physical Sky
| | 00:11 | with a really
uninteresting ground plane out there.
| | 00:14 | So especially if we wanted this to
represent a specific location,
| | 00:18 | we'd definitely want to take photographs on site.
| | 00:20 | Even if we were not trying to do a
specific locale, we'd still want to have
| | 00:24 | something interesting to
look at out the window.
| | 00:27 | So there's a couple of
different ways of accomplishing this.
| | 00:29 | One is to use an environment map
and that's how mr Physical Sky works.
| | 00:35 | If we go into Rendering > Environment,
we got the Environment Map here.
| | 00:40 | Now you could put a bitmap in there and
you could set that up so that it would
| | 00:44 | map onto an invisible sphere or an
invisible cylinder that's an infinite
| | 00:49 | distance away from your scene and
that's kind of like a finesse way of doing it
| | 00:55 | but the problem with the finesse way
of doing it is that 3ds Max is not very
| | 00:59 | happy with that and you'll
actually have performance issues.
| | 01:02 | You'll not be able to
effectively visualize what you're doing.
| | 01:05 | It'll be really hard for you to
actually function through that methodology.
| | 01:10 | So the other way of doing this is with
self-illuminating geometry, to create an
| | 01:14 | actual object that represents your
environment and this is a little bit more
| | 01:20 | work for you to do but at least
you'll be able to see what you're doing and
| | 01:24 | you'll be able to control it by, for
example, moving and rotating the objects or
| | 01:29 | constraining objects to the camera and so on.
| | 01:32 | So that's what I recommend actually
is to use self-illuminating geometry and
| | 01:36 | that's the technique that we'll
be using in the following videos.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Acquiring or creating background images| 00:00 | Let's take a moment in Photoshop to
look at some images and talk about how to
| | 00:04 | acquire or create
backgrounds for using a 3D scene.
| | 00:09 | So there are several
different ways of doing this.
| | 00:12 | I am going to show you two ways in this course.
| | 00:14 | The first is just a single static image,
just a single photograph such as this one.
| | 00:20 | This is really only good for small
windows because if you have a large
| | 00:24 | window, it really won't be realistic
if you try to stretch that across the
| | 00:28 | entire area of the window.
| | 00:30 | So we'll use this just to show what it
would be like looking out the bathroom
| | 00:34 | window in our scene.
| | 00:36 | Another way we can do it is through a
cylindrical panorama and so the concept
| | 00:42 | here is you start from a series of
photographs and each one of these is taken
| | 00:47 | from the same position but
just at a different angle.
| | 00:51 | And the beauty of this is that
Photoshop makes it really easy for you to stitch
| | 00:55 | those all together into a panorama.
| | 00:58 | So this is the result of all those
photographs being stitched together in Photoshop.
| | 01:03 | Pretty cool!
| | 01:04 | So the tool that you want to
use for that is called Photomerge.
| | 01:08 | We are not really going to go through
that now because it's kind of out of
| | 01:11 | scope for this course, but you can
find it here in the File menu, under
| | 01:16 | Automate > Photomerge and you can correct for
distortion, all kinds of fun stuff within here.
| | 01:23 | You can look that up in
the Photoshop documentation.
| | 01:26 | There's other ways of acquiring
panoramas as well. In fact, there are cameras
| | 01:30 | now in which you just basically
swipe the cameras through the air and it will
| | 01:35 | capture a cylindrical panorama for you.
| | 01:38 | Anyway you slice it, you want to end
up with a long thin image with a really
| | 01:43 | wide aspect ratio that then you can
map onto a cylinder in your 3D scene.
| | 01:48 | You can also by the way use a
spherical projection but that's much more
| | 01:52 | difficult to achieve.
| | 01:54 | So we're going to stick with the
cylindrical projection in this case, and that's
| | 01:57 | fine for an interior because we're not
really going to be able to look directly
| | 02:01 | straight up out the window anyway.
| | 02:04 | So cylinder is going to
be fine for our purposes.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Modeling a flat image plane backdrop| 00:00 | Now we're going to create a flat image
plane backdrop outside this bathroom window.
| | 00:05 | I've done a rendering here already
with just the default mental ray, sun and
| | 00:10 | sky, Physical Sky environment backdrop,
and you know, a little bit underwhelmed
| | 00:17 | by this and I'd rather have
something more interesting to look at.
| | 00:20 | You'll note that I've adjusted the
Exposure Value in order to be better expose
| | 00:25 | for the exterior light.
| | 00:27 | So just like in the real world there is
a huge difference between the brightness
| | 00:31 | level of the sky and the brightness
level of this wall inside the room.
| | 00:36 | So I try to split the difference
here by setting this to a value of 7.
| | 00:39 | So we're going to go ahead and
create the backdrop and we'll do this by
| | 00:43 | creating a simple plane.
| | 00:45 | I am going to go to Create > Standard
Primitives > Plane and I'll just draw this out
| | 00:50 | in my side view here, left view, and in
order to make sure that my image isn't
| | 00:55 | stretching funny on that plane.
| | 00:57 | I want to make sure that the
plane has the correct aspect ratio.
| | 01:00 | So, of course,aspect ratio is the width
of an image divided by the height, so I
| | 01:04 | need to have my image handy in
order to figure out what that aspect is.
| | 01:08 | I'll go ahead and open up my image.
I have already placed it into my appropriate
| | 01:14 | folder, which is sceneassets images.
| | 01:17 | Okay, this one is called glen_park_canyon.
| | 01:20 | I just want to open it up in its own
window in 3ds Max, so I can figure out what
| | 01:25 | its aspect ratio is.
| | 01:26 | I don't want it to be
stretched funny on my image plane.
| | 01:30 | So if I right-click, I'll get
information once again and you'll see up at the
| | 01:34 | top left it says Width and Height.
| | 01:36 | So those are the pixel
dimensions of the selected image.
| | 01:40 | Now where you see it says Aspect.
Don't be confused by that because that's
| | 01:44 | talking about the aspect
ratio of pixels or pixel ratio.
| | 01:49 | You might be aware that DV footage or
DVD video has non-square pixels while in
| | 01:56 | this case, this is square pixels and I can
tell that because it says the Aspect is 1.
| | 02:01 | So we're not concerned with pixel
aspect ratio here. We are concerned with the
| | 02:06 | image aspect ratio which is very
simple. If the pixel aspect ratio is 1,
| | 02:11 | then the image aspect ratio is the number of
pixels wide divided by the number of pixels tall.
| | 02:17 | So our image aspect ratio is
going to be 2304 divided by 3072.
| | 02:22 | I've got my calculator here.
| | 02:24 | So it's 2304 divided by 3072 is 0.75, so I
happen to know that that is a 3 to 4 aspect ratio.
| | 02:35 | It's 3/4. So my plane here should be 3
units wide by 4 units tall, so I'll go to
| | 02:44 | Modify panel and I can just set this
in whatever units are appropriate and
| | 02:48 | convenient, I can say.
| | 02:49 | All right, well, we can make this 4
feet wide by 3 feet tall and now I know the
| | 02:55 | aspect ratio is correct for
the image that I want to use.
| | 02:59 | Next thing I'll do is I'll move
this out to a distance, which would be
| | 03:03 | appropriate for this image.
| | 03:05 | In other words, that supposed to be the
other side of the canyon. It's supposed to
| | 03:08 | be quite a ways back.
| | 03:10 | Now it doesn't have to be physically
accurate in any way but it just has to be
| | 03:13 | somewhere in the ballpark. We don't
want it right up against the window because
| | 03:17 | in this it's going to look like a poster.
| | 03:18 | So I want to move it out just far
enough so that it kind of makes sense.
| | 03:22 | Once I moved it out there,
then I can just scale it up.
| | 03:25 | So I just grab the Scale tool, we go
and scale that up so that it fills the
| | 03:31 | area of the window.
| | 03:33 | And I want to make sure that it actually
fills more than I need. We can adjust the
| | 03:38 | exact positioning later.
| | 03:39 | Maybe I'll dolly out here and maybe
move it up or down a little bit but once I
| | 03:45 | get my texture on there, once I get
the image on there, I can make final
| | 03:48 | decisions about where this should be in
terms of how does it line up with the horizon line.
| | 03:53 | So that's the basics of creating it.
| | 03:55 | In the next video, we'll look at
creating the self-illuminating material for
| | 03:59 | this image plane backdrop.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Increasing map output for use with exposure control| 00:00 | Now that we've created the flat image
plane, it's time to put a material on it.
| | 00:05 | So I'll go ahead and open the
Material Editor and get an empty sample slot.
| | 00:10 | Currently, I've got a Standard material
in there, but I can't really effectively
| | 00:14 | use standard materials in this case,
because a standard material is going to
| | 00:19 | always project light into the
scene if it's self-illuminated.
| | 00:23 | That's just the way that standard
materials work in conjunction with Final Gather.
| | 00:27 | If Final Gather is on, a self-
illuminated standard material is going to project
| | 00:31 | light into the scene.
| | 00:32 | If I want to be able to control that,
then I can't use a standard material.
| | 00:36 | So instead I'll use Arch & Design.
| | 00:39 | So I'll convert this to
an Arch & Design material.
| | 00:42 | I want to choose the Matte Finish template.
| | 00:44 | We certainly don't want glossy
highlights on an image plane.
| | 00:47 | I'm going to set the Roughness to zero here.
| | 00:49 | What we're going to do with this is
we're going to assign a self-illumination map
| | 00:54 | and we're not going to
use the Diffuse Color at all.
| | 00:57 | So, in fact, I'm going to set Diffuse to black.
| | 01:00 | Likewise, we don't want any reflections
or transparency on a simple image plane.
| | 01:05 | So Diffuse to black,
Reflectivity and Transparency as zero.
| | 01:08 | Then I want to scroll down and I'm
looking for this Self-Illumination (Glow)
| | 01:11 | rollout, here it is.
| | 01:12 | Of course, I want to enable it.
| | 01:15 | Additionally, I want to choose the D65 color
temperature and that'll allow me to apply a filter.
| | 01:22 | So this is where I want to put my image map.
| | 01:24 | So I'm going to click this
button to assign the map.
| | 01:27 | It's going to be a bitmap,
so I'll double-click that.
| | 01:30 | That should take me directly to my current
projects, sceneassets/images. So here it is.
| | 01:36 | I've got Exercise Files,
chapter 13, sceneassets/images.
| | 01:42 | So here's my photograph, glen_park_canyon.
| | 01:45 | I'll go ahead and open that.
| | 01:46 | Now I've got some self-illumination on here.
| | 01:50 | I've got enough to be able to
test this to see what it looks like.
| | 01:53 | So I'll go ahead and assign that
onto my image plane and let's take a look.
| | 01:57 | Go ahead and render, and see what we get.
| | 02:01 | Now, depending upon the orientation of
the image plane, we might not get anything.
| | 02:05 | If the image plane is turned around
backwards, then mental ray won't see it at all.
| | 02:09 | So that might be the case here.
| | 02:10 | So I'm going to go ahead and cancel out of
here, because I think that's what's going on.
| | 02:14 | So I'll go ahead and select and
rotate this exactly 180 degrees around.
| | 02:19 | There we go, and give it
another whirl here. There we go.
| | 02:23 | So I'm seeing black out the window.
| | 02:26 | So that's what I expect to see at
this point, because even though it's
| | 02:28 | self-illuminated, it's not bright
enough in order to be seen because of
| | 02:33 | our exposure control.
| | 02:34 | Remember, we've got daylight out there
and that means that the image plane has
| | 02:39 | got to be as bright as daylight.
| | 02:41 | So in 3ds Max with exposure control,
there is no way to just say I want this
| | 02:46 | to be always 100% illuminated, and to
be exactly the same pixel brightness as
| | 02:51 | the original image.
| | 02:53 | So what I have to do I have to tweak
the self-illumination properties to
| | 02:56 | crank them up enough. Good!
| | 02:58 | So I'll go back into my
Material Editor. I am back here at my
| | 03:01 | self-illuminating material.
| | 03:03 | I'll go up one level and actually I
should give it a name, so I'll call this one
| | 03:07 | self illum backdrop.
| | 03:11 | Here's what we've got to play
with in here, the Luminance value.
| | 03:15 | So right now, it's set to
Unitless with a value of 1.
| | 03:19 | So you're going to want
to play around with this.
| | 03:22 | I've kind of experimented with this a
little bit in advance and I've found that
| | 03:27 | I can set my Physical Units
value in the range of thousands.
| | 03:32 | The default here is 1500.
| | 03:33 | Let's see what that gives us.
| | 03:36 | Okay, so now we've got a
backdrop out of our window.
| | 03:41 | Now this is not really physically
accurate, because really with the current
| | 03:46 | exposure setting and the current
brightness of the sun and sky, the environment
| | 03:52 | outside the window would be almost
completely white or very, very bright.
| | 03:56 | So this is kind of fake,
but if it looks good, do it.
| | 04:01 | Fake it till you make it.
| | 04:02 | But we can adjust this.
| | 04:03 | If we want this to be brighter,
obviously, we can set the value to be higher.
| | 04:07 | 5000 would probably be more
physically accurate in this case.
| | 04:11 | It's going to blast out, but that would
be what we would really see if we took a
| | 04:16 | real camera on-site, and shot it out a window.
| | 04:19 | But we can make it look however we want by
adjusting the Physical Units value over here.
| | 04:26 | There we've got a backdrop that's pretty
much physically correct in terms of the
| | 04:31 | exposure value we currently have.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting the color map to color-correct the backdrop| 00:00 | Now we've set the intensity of the
backdrop to be more or less physically
| | 00:04 | accurate, but we're not a slave to that.
| | 00:07 | We can set it to be whatever we want in
order to get a specific visual effect.
| | 00:11 | So I might choose to set my Physical Units
back down to 1500, which was the default.
| | 00:17 | In this particular case with the
exposure settings I have, it actually gives me
| | 00:21 | more or less the same brightness values
from the original photograph. That's fine.
| | 00:27 | I'm pretty happy with the brightness on this.
| | 00:30 | The issue however is that the color is
not right, because this photograph was
| | 00:35 | taken at about 1 p.m. on a sunny day.
| | 00:38 | The rendering that we're trying to
do here is actually more about 5 p.m.,
| | 00:43 | so there is orange light coming in
through the window, but yet the backdrop
| | 00:47 | is looking very blue.
| | 00:49 | So, we're definitely going
to want to color-correct that.
| | 00:52 | There's various ways of doing that.
| | 00:53 | One would be to choose one of the other
presets over here. Like for example,
| | 00:57 | I could choose the Incandescent filament
lamp preset, and let's do a region render
| | 01:03 | of that so we can see the difference
sort of in a split-screen side by side.
| | 01:07 | So now you see that's much more orange,
which is more appropriate to what I've
| | 01:14 | got in terms of the actual lighting. Or I
can also go in and plug in a specific value.
| | 01:21 | So, if I think that's too orange, maybe
instead of Incandescent filament, which
| | 01:26 | I happen to know is 2800, maybe I want
to choose 3200 degrees Kelvin and see
| | 01:32 | what that looks like.
| | 01:33 | So that's a little bit better, I think,
but it's still not really where I want to be.
| | 01:37 | I want to have finer control over this.
| | 01:39 | I want to be able to go in and
tweak the red, green, and blue
| | 01:43 | channels separately. So I can do that.
| | 01:46 | 3ds Max makes it really easy.
| | 01:48 | So in order to accomplish that
effectively, I'm going to reset this back to D65,
| | 01:53 | and I'm going to drill
down into the map parameters.
| | 01:57 | So here's my bitmap, open that up, and
scrolling down, within any bitmap in 3ds Max,
| | 02:03 | there's going to be an output rollout
and we can do things in here like
| | 02:07 | change the brightness
and the contrast and so on.
| | 02:10 | But what I really want to do is I want
to adjust the curves of the red, green,
| | 02:14 | and blue channels individually.
| | 02:16 | It works just like the
Curves Adjustment in Photoshop.
| | 02:18 | So to enable it, I'll turn
on Enable Color Map here.
| | 02:23 | You'll see there's two
different ways of doing this.
| | 02:25 | We've got Mono, which will affect red,
green, and blue equally, or I can go into
| | 02:29 | the RGB Mode, and now I've got three curves.
| | 02:33 | What I want to do here is I want to add points
in order to change the shape of these curves.
| | 02:38 | So over here I've got an Add Point
button, but this is going to be a linear
| | 02:42 | point, so what I really want is
a Bezier point or a curve point.
| | 02:46 | So I'm going to hold down the
button and choose Bezier point.
| | 02:49 | Then I click to create that Bezier
point and then I can choose the Move tool
| | 02:54 | over here to move these around.
| | 02:56 | Now currently, I'm moving all three red,
green, and blue curves simultaneously.
| | 03:00 | That's not immediately
obvious from the interface.
| | 03:03 | What I want to do is I want to turn
these curves on and off in order to
| | 03:07 | adjust them separately.
| | 03:08 | So for example, if I wanted to adjust
only the red curve, I would turn blue
| | 03:12 | and green off, and you can see there is a
ghostly green and blue curve there underneath.
| | 03:19 | So I can do those separately as well.
| | 03:21 | I can say okay well, I want
less green, and I can turn on blue.
| | 03:25 | Now I can do them all, because they're
not sitting directly on top of each other.
| | 03:30 | Now the only problem with this is I can't
really see the result in my viewport here.
| | 03:34 | So I'm kind of flying blind.
| | 03:36 | So what I'm going to do is I'm going
to go back up and I'm going to drag this
| | 03:39 | map out to its own slot and choose Instance.
| | 03:43 | So now I've got a better
sense of what I'm doing.
| | 03:45 | So when I make changes to this
instance map, it will be reflected in my
| | 03:49 | self-illuminated material.
| | 03:50 | So you can see already, that's looking
pretty good as far as what I'm trying to achieve.
| | 03:54 | I can toggle the Enable button on and off.
| | 03:59 | So, yeah let's give that a shot.
| | 04:01 | I'll go ahead and click Render.
| | 04:02 | At this point, it's looking pretty
similar to what I had, simply by just
| | 04:06 | changing the color temperature, but
I have the freedom to push this in
| | 04:10 | different directions.
| | 04:12 | So, I'm going to achieve effects that
would be impossible to achieve with just
| | 04:16 | adjusting their color temperature alone.
| | 04:19 | I'm watching in my sample
slot to see what I'm doing.
| | 04:22 | Of course, I can also move
the points at the end as well.
| | 04:27 | I might want to do these one at a time.
| | 04:30 | Say we don't want green to go up all the
way, and/or we don't want blue to go up
| | 04:35 | to full intensity either.
| | 04:36 | So now this is a very warm
color with almost purple skies.
| | 04:39 | In order to see this best, I might want
to actually reduce the intensity of the
| | 04:45 | bitmap as well, but it just gives
you an idea of how you can go about the
| | 04:49 | process of color correction using
this output rollout within the bitmap.
| | 04:53 | Finally, there is another way you can
do it, which is going to give you even
| | 04:57 | more control, and let you do
things like change the hue and so on.
| | 05:00 | So I'm going to turn this off.
| | 05:01 | We're back to neutral.
| | 05:03 | What I'll do is I'll go to the
Bitmap button here and click it.
| | 05:07 | This will allow me to essentially stack
another map on top of the existing one.
| | 05:11 | The one I'm looking for is color correction.
| | 05:13 | So I'll double-click that and I get a
pop-up asking me, do you want to discard
| | 05:18 | the old map or do you want to
keep the old map as a submap?
| | 05:21 | And certainly, we want to keep the old map.
| | 05:24 | What this will do is then apply the color
correction to the existing map. Click OK.
| | 05:29 | Here we go.
We've got the color correction map.
| | 05:32 | We can do all kinds of cool things in here.
| | 05:34 | Like I said, we can adjust the Hue.
| | 05:36 | We could put an alien landscape out
there, or we could correct for if there was
| | 05:40 | an error in the original image
acquisition, set that back to zero, or we could
| | 05:46 | adjust Saturation up or down just globally.
| | 05:50 | Finally, we can go down into the
advanced settings and do all kinds of fancy
| | 05:55 | stuff like gamma correct
this image directly here.
| | 05:59 | So I could say well, I want to
make it more contrasty and darker so I
| | 06:03 | could lower the gamma to something like 0.7,
and now it's much darker and more contrasty.
| | 06:10 | See what that gives me.
| | 06:10 | So you can see what's happened here
is by bringing the gamma down, now I've
| | 06:15 | got a richer color in the sky here, but an
overall general lightness of about the same.
| | 06:21 | So I could bring this down even further maybe.
| | 06:23 | 0.45, which is actually a magic number,
which is inverting the gamma of the image.
| | 06:30 | Maybe that's too dark, but I can
also play around with it all day long.
| | 06:34 | So those are the different ways that you
can color-correct a background image so
| | 06:39 | that you can get the artistic
effect that you want to achieve.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Applying a LookAt constraint to the image plane| 00:00 | I've color-corrected the map so
that it looks pretty good to me.
| | 00:03 | I ended up using the Output method
instead of the Color Correct Map method, but
| | 00:08 | however you do it, you just want to
adjust it so that it looks good from the
| | 00:12 | point of view of your camera.
| | 00:13 | The other thing we need to do to make
sure that looks good is to constrain the
| | 00:18 | rotation of the image plane, such that
it will always face towards the camera.
| | 00:23 | This is important to specially if
you've got a moving camera, got any kind of
| | 00:27 | walk-through or a tracking shot or any
kind of moving camera, if the image plane
| | 00:32 | is sitting static out there, it's
not going to give a very good illusion.
| | 00:36 | It's going to sort of feel like
it's a flat plane rather than an
| | 00:39 | actual environment.
| | 00:40 | So constraints come to the rescue here.
| | 00:43 | So what we want here is a LookAt
Constraint, which will cause the plane to
| | 00:47 | always face towards the camera.
| | 00:49 | Go ahead and close these other windows.
| | 00:51 | I'm going to maximize my top view with
Alt+W and this is a little bit tricky.
| | 00:56 | Especially if you've got a complex
scene with lots of geometry, it may be
| | 01:00 | difficult to select the
camera and not anything else.
| | 01:04 | So I want to do something special
here to make sure that I do this right.
| | 01:07 | So the first thing I'll do is I'll
select the image plane and then next,
| | 01:12 | I'm going to go up to the
Selection filter and choose Cameras.
| | 01:17 | That way when I click to make the
constraint, I know that I'll select the
| | 01:22 | camera and nothing else, like for
example, I wouldn't want to accidentally
| | 01:25 | constrain to my portal.
| | 01:27 | Then the next step is I'll
go to the Animation menu set.
| | 01:31 | I'm looking for Constraints > LookAt.
| | 01:34 | Go ahead and activate that
and then click the camera.
| | 01:38 | Now as soon as I do that now,
my image plane is going to rotate.
| | 01:42 | So I'll need to go into the Motion
panel and play around with that to make it
| | 01:45 | facing the correct direction.
| | 01:47 | So I'll go back out to Perspective view,
so I can kind of get an overview of
| | 01:52 | what's going on here.
| | 01:53 | To make it easier to tell what's
going on, I'm going to choose local
| | 01:57 | coordinates. I've got the Move tool
active and I want to go into Local
| | 02:00 | coordinates for the image plane.
| | 02:02 | So I'll be able to tell
exactly which axis is up here.
| | 02:06 | Go back to my Selection filter and choose All.
| | 02:10 | So let's take a look at how
this LookAt Constraint works.
| | 02:14 | I'm going to select my
camera and move it up and down.
| | 02:17 | You notice it's also constrained to
its own LookAt, its target, but the thing
| | 02:23 | that we're most interested in is the
rotation of the image plane here. Ctrl+Z to undo.
| | 02:28 | So, what I want to do is I want to
play around with the LookAt Constraint.
| | 02:32 | So I'm going to select image plane, and
I'll need to go to the Motion panel, and
| | 02:38 | I'll need to have the Rotation selected,
not Position or Scale, but Rotation.
| | 02:43 | In here, you will see all the different
controllers that are currently assigned
| | 02:48 | to this object, and here
we've got LookAt Constraint.
| | 02:53 | If you don't see the LookAt
Constraint rollout, you might want to make sure
| | 02:56 | that it's selected here.
| | 02:57 | So you've got LookAt Constraint.
| | 02:59 | So here is where we get to
choose how it's going to behave.
| | 03:03 | So there are two things we need to
concern ourselves with, which axis is going
| | 03:07 | to point towards the
camera and which axis is up.
| | 03:11 | So in this case, we are at local space
and so I can tell here that it's the Z axis
| | 03:16 | that should be pointed towards the camera.
| | 03:19 | So the LookAt axis is going to be Z.
| | 03:22 | So now, the Z-axis is
pointed towards the camera.
| | 03:26 | If I select that camera, there we go,
and move it around, we can see the image
| | 03:30 | plane is rotating to face the camera.
| | 03:32 | I'm going to go and select that again.
| | 03:35 | Then the other thing I need to
concern myself is which way is up?
| | 03:39 | So here we go. I've got to do
a little bit of analysis here.
| | 03:43 | The Y-axis is the top of the image.
| | 03:47 | Unfortunately, I can't see that
in the viewport here because of my
| | 03:51 | self-illuminated material.
| | 03:53 | So if that bugs you, you could just
create a standard material and quickly
| | 03:57 | assign it, but I happen to know that
the Y-axis is up here in this case.
| | 04:02 | So I'm going to go down here and
make sure that Y is my source axis.
| | 04:08 | Then that is going to be pointed up.
We have to tell it which way is up.
| | 04:14 | Of course, Z is up in 3ds Max.
| | 04:17 | It's a Z up convention.
| | 04:18 | So now I've got my image plane set up correctly.
| | 04:21 | So again, in this case, local Z of the
image plane should be pointed towards the camera;
| | 04:26 | local Y of the image
plane should be pointed up.
| | 04:32 | So, if what you have is not exactly
the same, let's say you've created your
| | 04:38 | image plane in a different view or whatever,
| | 04:41 | you just need to play around with these
until you basically get the result that
| | 04:44 | you want, and let's do a
rendering of this and see what we get.
| | 04:47 | I'll clone this off to another window just
so we'll have something to compare it to.
| | 04:52 | Essentially, that's all there is to it.
| | 04:54 | If I animate the camera moving, then I'll be
able to keep a consistent view out the window.
| | 05:00 | I can also move the image plane up or down,
vertically, in order to position it better.
| | 05:07 | It will still point towards the camera.
| | 05:09 | So it's basically a 2D plane
pointing at the camera now.
| | 05:14 | So let's say I want to see more of the sky.
| | 05:16 | I can grab the image plane.
| | 05:18 | Let's do this in the Perspective view,
and move it down so we'll see more sky.
| | 05:23 | Now I'm looking in my Camera view to
make sure that I don't move it down too far,
| | 05:27 | if you don't want to
actually see the background there.
| | 05:30 | So I'm going to bring this back up a little bit.
| | 05:37 | That is the procedure for assigning a
LookAt Constraint to an image plane such
| | 05:42 | that it will always face
directly towards the camera.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Modeling cylindrical panorama backgrounds| 00:00 | If you've got large windows or a
sliding glass door like this or any kind of
| | 00:04 | situation where we need to see a large
amount of environment outside, then we'll
| | 00:10 | probably want to use a cylindrical
environment, because that simple flat plane
| | 00:13 | is just not going to cut it.
| | 00:15 | So I'm going to go ahead and
create a cylinder. Drag that out.
| | 00:20 | You'll want it to be pretty big, release
the mouse, and drag upward to set the height.
| | 00:25 | Then click again to complete the cylinder,
and right-click to exist cylinder creation.
| | 00:31 | Then I'll want to move it up or down,
especially from the point of view of my
| | 00:36 | camera, because it's going to it
need to be below the horizon line.
| | 00:40 | Basically, I'm looking through the
window here and making sure that the
| | 00:44 | bottom of my panorama is below either
the window, or in this case, below the deck,
| | 00:50 | which is just here.
| | 00:52 | Good, so I've got it roughly positioned,
then I can go and increase the radius
| | 00:56 | and/or the height, so that it's
going to fill the frame, good.
| | 01:00 | So now I'm going to go to my front view
and press P. I'm going to convert that
| | 01:04 | to a Perspective view.
| | 01:05 | Press Z to zoom out, and
press F3 so I can see shading.
| | 01:10 | What I want to do here now is I want to
flip the surface normals so that I can
| | 01:16 | see through the cylinder from the
outside, but we'll still be able to see the
| | 01:20 | interior wall of the cylinder.
| | 01:21 | So to accomplish that, I'm going to
right-click and Convert To > Editable Poly.
| | 01:28 | Optionally, I can delete
the caps on the cylinder.
| | 01:31 | I'm going to choose to do that this time.
| | 01:32 | I'm going to select that top of the
cylinder and delete, select the bottom,
| | 01:37 | press the Delete key on the keyboard.
| | 01:40 | Then exit out of Sub-Object Mode.
| | 01:43 | Then I'm going to enable backface
culling, so I'll be able to hide the surfaces
| | 01:48 | that are pointed away from me.
| | 01:50 | I want to right-click, and
then go into Object Properties.
| | 01:54 | I want to enable Backface Cull.
| | 01:56 | When that's on, then the surfaces
whose polygon face normals are pointed away
| | 02:02 | from me are going to be hidden. Good.
| | 02:04 | So now I want to flip those normals.
| | 02:06 | So I'm going to go to Element Sub-
Object Mode and choose the entire surface
| | 02:11 | here, and then flip it, good.
| | 02:14 | So now I've got a situation in which I
can stand outside my cylinder and sort of
| | 02:19 | look at it from a God's eye point of view,
but yet from the point of view of the
| | 02:23 | interior, it will render just fine.
| | 02:26 | Good, so I've built this cylinder.
| | 02:29 | I'm going to go ahead and give this a name.
| | 02:31 | I'll call this CylinderPanorama.
| | 02:33 | Then the next step is I want to
create the map and play around with the map
| | 02:37 | tiling so I can get it
lined up just right in my view.
| | 02:40 | So I'll go to the Material Editor and
just like we did before, I'm going to create
| | 02:45 | an Arch & Design material.
| | 02:46 | You just go through those steps once
again. I'm going to use Matte Finish
| | 02:51 | with the Roughness of 0, Color of
black, scrolling down, looking for
| | 02:58 | self-illumination, I'll open that up, enable
it, I'll choose D65, and then choose a map.
| | 03:06 | It's going to be a bitmap. Here we go.
| | 03:08 | So I've got this one here.
| | 03:09 | It's called bernal_Panorama.
| | 03:11 | Be cautious about this Bitmap dialog
because it's going to want to mask off most
| | 03:17 | of your images, so this is a really
kind of unfortunate behavior of 3ds Max.
| | 03:23 | People have complained about this for years.
| | 03:24 | It's never going to change evidentially,
but what we want to see is All Formats
| | 03:28 | to make sure that we're seeing
what's really inside of this folder.
| | 03:31 | So I'm going to choose bernal_
Panorama in this case and click Open.
| | 03:36 | Now I've got a map. I want to turn on
Show Map in Viewport and then assign
| | 03:42 | it to the cylinder.
| | 03:43 | So as you can see, it's
stretching across the entire cylinder.
| | 03:46 | Now we're going to need to adjust the
mapping parameters here to adjust the
| | 03:50 | tiling to get it lined up the way we want it.
| | 03:52 | So, it's going to vary
depending upon your particular image.
| | 03:56 | So there is no one answer to this.
| | 03:59 | The U Tiling in particular
is going to need to change.
| | 04:02 | So, I think a value of about 5
works pretty well in this case.
| | 04:07 | In order to check this, I want to go
into my interior and I want to hit F3 so I
| | 04:12 | can see shading in the viewports.
| | 04:14 | I probably want to see default lighting
rather than scene lighting, and I don't
| | 04:18 | want to have exposure
control or anything like that.
| | 04:20 | I've just disabled all the fancy viewport
controls so that I can actually see out there.
| | 04:27 | At this point, I can play around with tiling.
| | 04:30 | I could also rotate the
cylinder in order to get it lined up.
| | 04:34 | If I know that I'm going to do a walk-
through, then I'll definitely want to
| | 04:37 | create a camera or at least get a
perspective camera in here and move around so
| | 04:41 | that I can check to see if my
panorama is actually working.
| | 04:45 | So, tell you what, I'm going
to go with my perspective view.
| | 04:48 | Ctrl+Alt+Middle-Mouse, so I can get inside here.
| | 04:52 | Additionally, I probably want
to have a wider field of view.
| | 04:56 | I want to move around in the scene and
check this from all possible points of
| | 05:02 | view that I'm going to actually be using.
| | 05:05 | So I can dolly forward a little bit, and
clearly, there is a big seam right there.
| | 05:11 | But it's easy enough to fix.
| | 05:12 | I'll just go ahead and grab the panorama
and rotate it in order to get rid of that.
| | 05:22 | So, it would take a little bit of time
for me to tweak this, but this is looking
| | 05:25 | pretty good as it is, I think.
| | 05:27 | So that's how you can create a
cylindrical panorama that will wrap around your
| | 05:30 | scene and will look good from different angles.
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|
|
14. Compositing Environment Backdrops in PhotoshopUnderstanding alpha channels| 00:00 | We've seen how to create an
environment backdrop in 3ds Max and render that
| | 00:04 | all in a single pass.
| | 00:06 | But there are other ways to do it.
| | 00:07 | If you want more control you might
want to use a compositing program like
| | 00:10 | Photoshop or After Effects and
layer 2D Images so that you can more
| | 00:16 | precisely color-correct them.
| | 00:17 | So let's take a look at that workflow.
| | 00:19 | In order to do that, you need to
understand what alpha channels are.
| | 00:22 | An alpha channel is
transparency in a bitmap image.
| | 00:27 | In the rendered frame window in 3ds
Max, I can view an alpha channel by
| | 00:32 | clicking this button here.
| | 00:33 | What we see here is a black-and-white image.
| | 00:36 | In the conventional alpha channel,
white means this area is going to
| | 00:41 | be completely opaque and black
means that area is going to be
| | 00:44 | completely transparent.
| | 00:46 | Any gray pixels will be partially transparent.
| | 00:49 | So when I render an image here, even
though I've got an environment out there,
| | 00:54 | the mr Physical Sky environment,
| | 00:57 | it's ignored in the alpha
channel and that's what we want.
| | 01:01 | Because what we want to do is replace this
background with another background in Photoshop.
| | 01:07 | So that's the essentials
of what an alpha channel is.
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| Rendering still images for After Effects or Photoshop| 00:00 | If you want to composite your
background in Photoshop or After Effects or any
| | 00:04 | other compositing software, then
there is one or two things you need to pay
| | 00:08 | attention to in 3ds Max.
| | 00:10 | By default the edge pixels of your
foreground are going to be blended with
| | 00:17 | the edge pixels of the background, so that we
don't get jagged edges at that transition zone.
| | 00:23 | So that's going to be anti-aliased by
default, just like everything else in the
| | 00:27 | mental ray rendering.
| | 00:28 | And that's fine except if we were
to just leave this as it is and try to
| | 00:32 | composite it in Photoshop,
| | 00:34 | what we would end up with is a white
fringe in this case around this area.
| | 00:41 | We don't want that obviously.
| | 00:42 | We want to prevent that from happening.
| | 00:44 | So the key to this is we can turn off
the mr Physical Sky just by going to the
| | 00:50 | Environment dialog, Rendering>
Environment, and we can disable it by just clicking
| | 00:56 | Use Map and turn that off.
| | 00:58 | Go ahead and render.
| | 01:00 | Now that doesn't actually change the lighting.
| | 01:02 | All it's going to do is prevent that
backdrop from appearing in the rendering
| | 01:08 | and that way we won't get this anti-
aliasing between our foreground and
| | 01:13 | background with that white fringe.
| | 01:16 | So we can take a look at the Alpha Channel now,
and it looks exactly the same as it did before.
| | 01:22 | The only difference is we don't
have the actual image pixels of the mr
| | 01:26 | Physical Sky background.
| | 01:28 | The other thing we need to do is
make sure that we save this out with the
| | 01:31 | Alpha Channel intact.
| | 01:33 | So I am going to go to click Save over here.
| | 01:36 | It's one way to save out an image.
| | 01:37 | And I want to make sure that I save it
into my current folder, current project
| | 01:42 | folder's renderoutput.
| | 01:44 | That's the proper location to save
things out to, and I want to save it as,
| | 01:50 | we'll call this one bath.tga.
| | 01:54 | tga stands for Targa.
| | 01:56 | Let's say it's the safest format,
because it's one of the oldest formats, and
| | 02:01 | when I click Save here, I am going to be
prompted as far as what format options I want.
| | 02:07 | And what I want is definitely 32 bits per pixel.
| | 02:11 | That's very important, because a 32
bit per pixel image in this case means it
| | 02:16 | has four channels, Red, Green, Blue and Alpha,
or what's traditionally known as an RGB+A.
| | 02:24 | This switch, whether it's pre-
multiplied or not, it's not really going to
| | 02:28 | make any difference in this case and
the Compress switch, it's not going to
| | 02:33 | apply lossy compression.
| | 02:34 | It's a form of lossless compression,
which doesn't degrade the image.
| | 02:38 | It's called RLE or Run-
Length-Encoded compression.
| | 02:42 | Again it doesn't matter
whether this is on or off.
| | 02:44 | If it's on, you'll have a
slightly smaller file size.
| | 02:47 | So in fact these are the
default settings for the Targa image.
| | 02:50 | 32-Bits-Per-Pixel
compressed with Pre-Multiplied Alpha.
| | 02:55 | Go ahead and click OK.
| | 02:56 | So that's how I'll save out an image in
order to prepare it for compositing in
| | 03:01 | Photoshop, After Effects or any
other compositing application.
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| Converting the alpha channel to a Photoshop layer mask| 00:00 | We've rendered our foreground with
32-Bits-Per-Pixel in alpha channel.
| | 00:05 | And now I have got it here in
Photoshop, we can take a look at it.
| | 00:08 | So currently there is only a single layer.
| | 00:10 | I am going to just quickly unlock
that layer so I can edit it just by
| | 00:14 | double-clicking. Just click OK.
| | 00:17 | And I want to then
investigate the Channels palette.
| | 00:20 | So I'll go to the Channels and you'll see
here, we've got Red, Green, Blue, and Alpha.
| | 00:25 | And we can look at each one of these separately.
| | 00:27 | So here's the alpha channel.
| | 00:28 | That's what it looks like, just as we expected.
| | 00:30 | What I want to do here is I want to
convert the alpha channel into a Photoshop
| | 00:35 | layer mask so that then I can
composite a separate background behind it.
| | 00:40 | So the process for that is pretty simple.
| | 00:42 | I am going to hold down the Ctrl key
and click on the alpha channel and what
| | 00:48 | that does is it loads that in as a selection.
| | 00:51 | So when you Ctrl+Click on a channel or
layer in Photoshop, anything that's white
| | 00:57 | is fully selected and anything that
black is not selected and any pixels that
| | 01:01 | are gray will be partially selected.
| | 01:04 | So I have got the selection loaded.
| | 01:05 | Go back to the Layers palette and click on
that layer and now I want to add a layer mask.
| | 01:10 | I am going to go to the Layer menu >
Layer Mask and I want to Reveal Selection.
| | 01:18 | So in other words all the white pixels
are going to be visible and all the black
| | 01:23 | pixels are going to be invisible.
| | 01:25 | So now I have just converted the
channel to a layer mask, and you can see
| | 01:30 | the layer mask here.
| | 01:32 | And with layer masks, I can play around with it.
| | 01:34 | I can click on it, with the Alt key held
down, so that I can actually see it or I
| | 01:40 | could select the pixels of the image
again and I can Shift+Click on the layer
| | 01:46 | mask to disable it or enable it,
just so I can see what I am doing.
| | 01:50 | So now I just want to load in an
image and place that in the background.
| | 01:55 | So I'll go to File > Open and
I want to navigate for this.
| | 01:58 | So I'm currently in my current project's
renderoutput folder so I want to go up
| | 02:03 | to where my backdrops are
currently stored in sceneassets/images.
| | 02:06 | So let's grab one of these, glen
_park_canyon.jpg, open that up.
| | 02:12 | So now I've got a JPG image and
now I want to composite that into the
| | 02:17 | background of the other image.
| | 02:20 | So to do that I will go back to the
Layers palette and click on this button
| | 02:24 | over here on the right and what I want to do
is duplicate that layer into the other image.
| | 02:30 | So I want to choose the other document.
| | 02:33 | It's currently just still
called bath.tga, and click OK.
| | 02:36 | Then I'll go back to my original
document and just want to swap these layers out,
| | 02:42 | so I'll bring this new layer to
the Background below the original and now
| | 02:47 | I've got an image in the background.
| | 02:51 | So that's the basic of how you would
create the layering, and next we are going
| | 02:55 | to adjust this, change of size,
and we are going to color correct.
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| Using Photoshop adjustment layers for color correction| 00:00 | The last steps here to complete our
compositing job in Photoshop are to scale
| | 00:05 | the background and to color correct it.
| | 00:08 | So I want to zoom back actually with my
Magnifying Glass because my background
| | 00:15 | is very, very large compared to the foreground.
| | 00:17 | The foreground was only about 360 by 180
pixels and the background is more in the
| | 00:24 | order of 3700 pixels.
| | 00:27 | So I've zoomed way back because I know
that my background is going to be huge.
| | 00:32 | Okay, so I've got my Background
layer selected, go to the Edit menu >
| | 00:36 | Transform > Scale, and what I want
to do is grab one of these corners in
| | 00:43 | order to scale the background.
| | 00:44 | But if I just grab it and move it then
I'm going to actually be stretching the
| | 00:49 | aspect ratio of the
background and I don't want that.
| | 00:52 | So let me hit Ctrl+Z to undo that.
| | 00:55 | And I want to make sure I am holding
down the Shift key when I drag one of
| | 00:59 | these corners, because that's going
to actually maintain the aspect ratio.
| | 01:03 | I can click in this center area, not on
the dot in the center, but any one of
| | 01:07 | these sort of blank areas here in
order to move the image, reposition it, and
| | 01:11 | then I can hold down Shift once
again and scale it down a little bit more.
| | 01:15 | This one's a little bit tricky because
there is such a disparity between the
| | 01:18 | size of the foreground and background.
| | 01:20 | I will Shift+Click and shrink
that down a little bit more.
| | 01:24 | And if I get it basically in the
ballpark then I can hit Enter and let's go
| | 01:28 | back to actual pixels.
| | 01:30 | And I can grab the Move tool with
the background selected and I can
| | 01:35 | position that background.
| | 01:36 | It's still the wrong size.
| | 01:38 | I can go back and scale it again.
| | 01:40 | Be cautious though about scaling.
| | 01:43 | You don't want to scale things down
and then scale them back up again.
| | 01:47 | But I am just going to scale this down
a little bit more, holding down Shift
| | 01:51 | and repositioning this.
| | 01:53 | Now by the way until I hit Enter, this
scale is not actually being performed,
| | 01:57 | so it's okay for me to scale this down
and then back up again here, because I am
| | 02:01 | just getting it sorted out.
| | 02:03 | Let's say I am happy with that and then
I'll hit Enter. Good! So I've scaled it.
| | 02:08 | I can still go and move it around as a
layer too if I want. Say I am happy with that.
| | 02:13 | Then I want to color correct it.
| | 02:14 | Now there are a lot of ways of
color correction in Photoshop.
| | 02:18 | It's very advanced.
| | 02:19 | What you want to avoid doing is
a destructive color correction.
| | 02:24 | In other words, we don't want to actually
permanently alter the pixels of the background.
| | 02:28 | It's much better if we
perform a non-destructive edit.
| | 02:31 | So we're going to use an adjustment
layer instead of a standard adjustment.
| | 02:36 | Because an adjustment layer is non-
destructive and we can make changes later and
| | 02:40 | it won't have any deleterious effects.
| | 02:43 | It won't actually degrade the image,
if we change our adjustment layer.
| | 02:48 | So in CS4, we actually have an
Adjustments palette here now and I can just click
| | 02:54 | on any one of these to add one.
| | 02:56 | So for example there is a Curves Adjustment.
| | 02:58 | So I've got the Background layer
active and I'll just click here to add a
| | 03:01 | Curves adjustment layer.
| | 03:02 | And you can see it here.
| | 03:03 | That's a new layer.
| | 03:05 | That's above the background.
| | 03:06 | And by default this adjustment
layer will affect everything below it.
| | 03:10 | Okay, so now I can start playing around.
| | 03:12 | So this is very similar to what we
saw in 3ds Max with the Color Map in
| | 03:17 | the Bitmap rollouts.
| | 03:19 | So and I can go in and adjust each one
of these Red, Green and Blues separately
| | 03:22 | in order to get the look that I want.
| | 03:26 | Go back to RGB which is the black-and-
white and then we can go to each one
| | 03:31 | of these separately. We can reduce the Green,
reduce the Blue and it looks like Mars now.
| | 03:36 | So obviously we don't want to
go quite that insane with this.
| | 03:42 | And the beauty of this once
again is this is an adjustment layer.
| | 03:46 | We can change our mind about this later.
| | 03:48 | I can go in here and for example turn it off,
turn it back on again. See the results.
| | 03:54 | I can save this file as a Photoshop
document and then come back tomorrow
| | 03:58 | and play around with these curves
again, and it's not going to have a
| | 04:02 | generation loss effect.
| | 04:03 | If I just use the Image > Adjustments
menu here, that would be a destructive act.
| | 04:11 | It would actually permanently alter
the pixels, and if I try to apply another
| | 04:15 | adjustment successively, it would
degrade the image, because doing successive
| | 04:20 | adjustments is going to do evil things to
image. So don't go there. So there we go.
| | 04:27 | We've got our Curves adjustment layer.
| | 04:29 | I want to save this as a Photoshop document.
| | 04:32 | Currently, I've got a
renderoutput folder, but you know what?
| | 04:36 | I probably want to keep that clean
and I am going to go up one level in my
| | 04:41 | 3ds Max folder structure and I am going to
create a custom folder and that's perfectly fine.
| | 04:46 | You can create as many folders as
you want inside your 3ds Max project
| | 04:51 | folder structure, as long as you don't delete
any of the pre-named ones that are already there.
| | 04:56 | So I am just going to call this
one photoshop and I'll call this
| | 04:59 | one bath_composite.
| | 05:04 | That's how you composite backdrops in an
external program, in this case Photoshop.
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|
|
15. Ambient Occlusion in Arch & Design MaterialsUnderstanding ambient occlusion| 00:00 | To achieve even greater realism in
renderings, you can use a special effect
| | 00:04 | called Ambient Occlusion.
| | 00:07 | This is a technique that comes
from the film industry and it's a
| | 00:11 | computationally inexpensive
effect for contact shadows.
| | 00:16 | That means it doesn't take long to render.
| | 00:19 | And it gives us a little bit
better quality to our renderings.
| | 00:23 | Let's take a look at a before and
after picture of Ambient Occlusion.
| | 00:29 | So here we have no Ambient Occlusion.
| | 00:32 | You'll notice how the box doesn't
necessarily really feel like it's sitting on
| | 00:38 | the table terribly well.
| | 00:40 | Do a render with Ambient Occlusion
turned on and here you'll see we are getting
| | 00:45 | a dark line here and here.
| | 00:47 | There is also a subtle difference here
in where the walls join together here.
| | 00:53 | So again this is Ambient Occlusion
off and this is Ambient Occlusion on.
| | 00:58 | So what does it mean anyway?
| | 01:00 | Well, ambient light is light that comes
from all over and occlusion means blocking.
| | 01:06 | And the concept here is that we want to
prevent this ambient light from reaching
| | 01:12 | into the crevices where
objects are very close together.
| | 01:17 | Now Ambient Occlusion would not be
necessary if Final Gather settings were very,
| | 01:22 | very high, but very, very high
Final Gather settings are prohibitively,
| | 01:30 | computationally expensive.
They take way too long to render.
| | 01:33 | So this is a quick way of getting good results.
| | 01:36 | Now there are many ways
to use Ambient Occlusion.
| | 01:39 | You can do all kinds of amazing things with it.
| | 01:41 | We are going to look at two ways in this course.
| | 01:44 | The first is through the Arch and
Design Material and the second is for a Scene
| | 01:49 | Wide Ambient Occlusion effect.
| | 01:52 | You only want to use one of
these two methods in your scene.
| | 01:55 | It's not a good idea to combine them.
| | 01:57 | So that's the idea behind Ambient
Occlusion and next we are going to look at
| | 02:02 | enabling it in the Arch & Design material.
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| Enabling AO in the arch & design material| 00:00 | Let's look at how to enable
Ambient Occlusion in Arch & Design.
| | 00:05 | So if you want to get the benefits of
Ambient Occlusion, then you'll want to
| | 00:10 | use the Arch & Design material or some
of the ProMaterials have it as well,
| | 00:15 | only if it's relevant.
| | 00:16 | For example, the glazing ProMaterial
doesn't have Ambient Occlusion because you
| | 00:20 | wouldn't want contact
shadows on window glazing anyway.
| | 00:24 | So I've got three materials here in this scene.
| | 00:26 | I've got green, red, and white, and each
one of them is an Arch & Design material.
| | 00:33 | So if I select one of these, I can
scroll down in Arch & Design and what I'm
| | 00:37 | looking for is a rollout
labeled Special Effects.
| | 00:40 | I'll go in there and here
you go Ambient Occlusion.
| | 00:44 | It's right here, so I will enable it.
| | 00:46 | We're going to play around with some of
these parameters here, but let's just go
| | 00:51 | ahead and enable it in each one of these,
so I'll grab my green material, scroll
| | 00:57 | down, Special Effects, and turn it on.
| | 01:00 | And the red, once again scrolling and
turning on Ambient Occlusion and now
| | 01:07 | I have enabled it in all three of my materials.
| | 01:09 | Here before enabling it, let's clone our
rendered frame window and do a quick render.
| | 01:17 | This is the expected workflow with
Arch & Design, which is you're using Final
| | 01:24 | Gather and Ambient Occlusion in the same scene.
| | 01:28 | Essentially, you're trying to use Final
Gather to get the sort of overall wash
| | 01:35 | and then you're using Ambient Occlusion
to get the fine details in the shadows.
| | 01:40 | So there you go. We've got no contact
shadows here and yes, contact shadows over here.
| | 01:47 | And that's how you enable
Ambient Occlusion in Arch & Design.
| | 01:51 | Pretty simple, isn't it?
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| Using color from other materials| 00:00 | The Ambient Occlusion implementation in
Arch & Design has a pretty interesting
| | 00:06 | feature which will allow you to achieve
an effect very similar to Final Gather
| | 00:12 | and that's called Use
Color From Other Materials.
| | 00:16 | You'll see it here.
| | 00:17 | So in this example, I've completely
disabled Final Gather and this is a
| | 00:22 | rendering with no Final Gather and
just the default setting for Ambient
| | 00:26 | Occlusion, which is Use Color turned off.
| | 00:28 | We'll make a clone of that so we
can compare these two. So here it is.
| | 00:34 | Use Color is turned off and in my
white material, I'll just go ahead and turn
| | 00:38 | that on and do another quick render.
| | 00:44 | If you look closely, you'll see we're
getting actually some splash here and
| | 00:49 | that's actually coming from this
surface and splashing onto a nearby surface.
| | 00:54 | Again that's a pretty subtle effect and you
might not notice if Final Gather is enabled.
| | 01:01 | But I thought I showed that to you,
because it's kind of a cool effect and
| | 01:05 | once we play around with some of our
other parameters here, we can exaggerate
| | 01:10 | that and make it a bit stronger, and
go around to the other materials and
| | 01:14 | enable it in there too.
| | 01:16 | I've got a green material.
Enable it on all three and re-render.
| | 01:24 | And if you look at it very closely,
you'll see there should be a little bit of
| | 01:28 | splash here around the corner.
| | 01:30 | We're getting a little bit of a
white line here on the red wall, where we
| | 01:34 | didn't see it over here.
| | 01:36 | And again that's the illusion of
light bouncing from the floor and touching
| | 01:41 | the wall, just here.
| | 01:43 | So again that's Use Color From Other
Materials, Exact Ambient Occlusion.
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| Setting ambient occlusion parameters| 00:00 | Now that we have Use Color From Other
Materials enabled, it's easier for us to
| | 00:05 | see the effect of adjusting some of
the other Ambient Occlusion parameters.
| | 00:12 | So specifically, you can see that this
is not spreading out very much and it's
| | 00:16 | also a bit on the grainy side.
| | 00:17 | So what we're going to do is we're
going to go into our white material and we
| | 00:23 | can play around with these
two parameters up top here.
| | 00:27 | The number of Samples and the Max Distance.
| | 00:30 | Let's take a look at Max Distance first.
| | 00:33 | So it's currently set to 6 inches, the
default in 3ds Max is actually 4 inches.
| | 00:38 | I'll turn this up to let's say 12
inches, 1 foot, and let's do a side-by-side
| | 00:44 | rendering once again, comparison.
| | 00:48 | So having set it to a foot, now you
can see we're getting a much better
| | 00:52 | spread and it's actually showing up
on the other materials much better as well,
| | 00:56 | and remembering that these
objects are fairly large. This box I believe
| | 01:02 | is about 2 feet tall.
| | 01:04 | So having done that we're getting better
splash but now it's looking really grainy.
| | 01:09 | So if you see grain in your Ambient
Occlusion renderings, then you'll want to
| | 01:14 | increase the number of Samples. Let's try 32.
| | 01:18 | Okay, that's better but
we can make it even better.
| | 01:21 | I'm going to do a region render so we
don't have to wait as long for that.
| | 01:26 | Useful values for the Samples range from
16 to about 64, and we should probably use
| | 01:32 | power of two numbers because that will
give you more efficient renderings and at
| | 01:38 | a value 64 that's looking pretty good.
| | 01:41 | So I could go around to all of my
materials and let's say set these all to 12 inches
| | 01:49 | and do a full render once again,
to see if you're getting much splash on
| | 01:57 | the other parts of the scene.
| | 02:00 | And in fact, we're getting a little bit
more obvious bleeding in the colors here.
| | 02:06 | So that's essentially all you need to do.
| | 02:08 | You just maybe turn up the number of
Samples on these as well and mental ray
| | 02:15 | does all the rest for you.
| | 02:19 | Okay, so that kind of gives you an
understanding of how this Use Color From
| | 02:23 | Other Materials works.
| | 02:24 | Now there is no rule that says that
you have to do that and especially if
| | 02:28 | you're using it in conjunction with
Final Gather, you might choose to not Use
| | 02:34 | Color From Other Materials but simply
set a Shadow Color and by default the
| | 02:39 | Shadow Color is set to a neutral gray.
| | 02:42 | If you want a more exaggerated effect, you can
reduce the Shadow Color to black. So let's try that.
| | 02:48 | I'll do that on all of my materials.
| | 02:50 | Give them a black shadow color.
| | 02:53 | We'll turn off Use Color From Other
Materials and we turn Final Gather back on.
| | 02:59 | We'll clone this out just to give you an
idea of the options you have with Ambient Occlusion.
| | 03:07 | So having turned Final Gather on, my
Exposure is too high, so I'm going to just
| | 03:11 | quickly turned that back to what I
had before which was the value of 4.
| | 03:16 | And so now I think this is
looking pretty good because we're getting
| | 03:19 | splash from the Final Gather and
we're getting good-looking contact shadows
| | 03:26 | in the crevices here.
| | 03:27 | Due to Ambient Occlusion. I've
increased the Ambient Occlusion distance to 12
| | 03:33 | inches and I've increased the Sampling
and I'm pretty happy with this rendering.
| | 03:38 | That's how you can use Ambient Occlusion
within the Arch & Design and ProMaterials.
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|
|
16. Scene-Wide Ambient OcclusionUnderstanding the need for a "poor man's global illumination"| 00:00 | Final Gather gives great results for
Ambient Light splashing through your scene.
| | 00:06 | However, it's not usually well suited
to animations due to excessive render
| | 00:10 | times and flickering issues.
| | 00:13 | Now as we saw before you can work
around the flickering by using the Final
| | 00:17 | Gather option, Project points along camera path.
| | 00:21 | However, that doesn't solve
the problem of the render times.
| | 00:24 | So Ambient Occlusion is a way out of
this problem because we can get pretty good
| | 00:29 | results with Ambient Occlusion,
and to not use Final Gather at all.
| | 00:35 | So here are three images to
illustrate the power of Ambient Occlusion
| | 00:39 | for scene-wide fake global
illumination or what I call a poor man's
| | 00:45 | global illumination.
| | 00:46 | On the left, we have an image with no
ambient light at all and Final Gather
| | 00:50 | disabled and of course, not very
believable because we have absolute solid
| | 00:55 | black here in the shadow areas that are not
illuminated by the sun, sky or sky portals.
| | 01:02 | Here we have an Ambient light, which is
not using Ambient Occlusion, and this a
| | 01:08 | little bit better but
still nowhere near good enough.
| | 01:12 | Look at how flat this wall is.
| | 01:14 | We've just traded an absolutely black
wall for an absolutely gray wall and, for
| | 01:20 | example, look in the corner here.
| | 01:21 | You can't even see the corner.
| | 01:23 | It's all just gray straight through there.
| | 01:26 | So this is just an Ambient light with
no occlusion and then the third image
| | 01:31 | we'll see here is the full render
with scene_wide_ambient_occlusion.
| | 01:37 | And that's what we're
going to do in this chapter.
| | 01:40 | Now you could use Arch & Design to get
a similar effect, but the issue is that
| | 01:46 | Arch & Design Ambient
Occlusion is going to be slower.
| | 01:50 | Also you might not want to use Arch &
Design materials on all of your objects,
| | 01:55 | due to render times or whatever.
| | 01:56 | Maybe you've got standard materials
and you want to keep them, but you still
| | 02:00 | want the effect of Ambient Occlusion.
| | 02:03 | The technique I'm going to show you
will allow you to get Ambient Occlusion
| | 02:07 | with any materials.
| | 02:08 | So you don't have to use
Arch & Design or ProMaterials.
| | 02:12 | So you don't have to wait for the long
render times and it's really quite effective.
| | 02:18 | The other thing is that if you do it
the way I'm about to show you, you'll get
| | 02:22 | actually more options and
control than you do with Arch & Design.
| | 02:25 | With one exception.
| | 02:27 | You won't get accurate color bleeding.
| | 02:29 | So we want to actually get color
splashing from one surface to another.
| | 02:34 | It's just basic
illumination without color bleed.
| | 02:38 | But in most cases, it's going to be good
enough and especially for walkthroughs,
| | 02:42 | this is what I recommended you do.
| | 02:43 | So we're going to take a look at
poor man's global illumination with
| | 02:47 | scene-wide ambient occlusion.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a standard omni light at the origin| 00:00 | The first step towards creating scene-wide
ambient occlusion is to create an Ambient Light.
| | 00:07 | Now you might be familiar with the
Ambient setting in the Environment dialog.
| | 00:11 | That's not what we want in this case.
| | 00:13 | What we're doing here is
actually really quite tricky.
| | 00:15 | We're creating a light and then we're
going to mask off the effect of the light
| | 00:21 | based upon the proximity of surfaces.
| | 00:24 | So this is a little bit of a process but
we'll get really good results at the end of it.
| | 00:29 | So what we need to do first is to
create a standard Omni Light at the origin.
| | 00:35 | So to make sure that it's created at
the origin, I'm going to turn on 3D
| | 00:39 | Snaps and you might want to right-
click and make sure that Grid Points is the
| | 00:43 | only option enabled.
| | 00:46 | I'm going to go to the Create panel,
under Lights and this is the only time in
| | 00:52 | mental ray that you're
going to use standard lights.
| | 00:57 | So, so far if you want photometrics to
be accurate and you want to have a good
| | 01:02 | Final Gather, you should always use
photometric lights but this is the one
| | 01:06 | exception to the rule.
| | 01:07 | We want to go in here and use the old
school standard lights and the other
| | 01:11 | one we want is an Omni Light, so
that's going to shine light in all
| | 01:15 | directions equally.
| | 01:16 | I want to create it at the
origin and that's a requirement.
| | 01:21 | It needs to be precisely at
the origin and nowhere else.
| | 01:24 | I'm going to right-click
and my light's been created.
| | 01:28 | I'll turn-off Snaps and I just want
to make doubly, triply sure that it's
| | 01:32 | exactly at the origin and nowhere else.
| | 01:35 | So with my Move tool selected, I can
right-click and open up the Move Transform
| | 01:40 | Type-In and this is telling me that the
light is at the origin, at an Absolute:
| | 01:45 | World position of 0, 0, 0.
| | 01:48 | So now we've got our light where it needs to be.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting intensity and enabling ambient only| 00:00 | We've created our Omni Light at the origin and
now we want to adjust some of its parameters.
| | 00:05 | So with it selected, I'm going to go
to the Modify panel and I need to adjust
| | 00:10 | a couple of things.
| | 00:11 | First of all, the Intensity.
| | 00:13 | For standard lights, Intensity is set
from this Multiplier value and this value
| | 00:19 | does not have any
relationship to real-world metrics.
| | 00:22 | So you're going to have to set
it to some value that looks good.
| | 00:26 | We don't know what that is in advance,
so I would recommend for daylight scenes
| | 00:32 | maybe a value of about 100 but you might
have to tweak it and adjust it for your scene.
| | 00:37 | So I've got the Multiplier
cranked up really, really high.
| | 00:41 | Normally, if you're not using
photometrics that would be an impossibly high
| | 00:45 | multiplier, but because we're dealing
with daylighting here, we need to sort of
| | 00:49 | match the intensity of daylight, so
I've got to crank that up quite a lot.
| | 00:54 | The other thing that I need to do is
over here in the Advanced Effects rollout,
| | 00:59 | I want to flip the
switch that says Ambient Only.
| | 01:02 | What this does is it just sends an
overall wash of light out to every object in
| | 01:09 | the scene, so every surface in the scene
is going to receive this wash of light.
| | 01:15 | So why don't we take a look at what
this actually does when we render?
| | 01:20 | I've got a rendered image
already, so we can pop that open.
| | 01:23 | You see in my Project folder,
under renderoutput/scene_ambient_only.
| | 01:31 | So this is the effect, once again, that
we get from an Ambient Light turned up
| | 01:36 | to a Multiplier of 100 and the Ambient
Only switch turned on, and once again,
| | 01:42 | it's just producing an even wash on
all surfaces, but we haven't yet applied
| | 01:48 | the Ambient Occlusion.
| | 01:50 | So that's how you'll create an Omni
Light and set its parameters in order to get
| | 01:54 | an even wash throughout your scene.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating an ambient/reflective occlusion map| 00:00 | Having created our Omni Light and set
its Multiplier value and enabled Ambient
| | 00:05 | Only, now we're ready to create the
ambient occlusion map and apply it to the
| | 00:11 | Projector slot of the Omni Light.
| | 00:13 | You may have seen Projector Maps before.
| | 00:16 | They're very cool because you can do
things like use a spotlight to project
| | 00:20 | an image on a wall.
| | 00:22 | In this case, we are going to use a
Projector Map to occlude the ambient light
| | 00:26 | based upon the proximity of surfaces.
| | 00:30 | So, let's go to the Material Editor
and grab an empty slot and I am going
| | 00:36 | to click Get Material.
| | 00:37 | That launches the Material/Map Browser
and if you have Maps enabled, which they
| | 00:42 | are enabled by default, then you'll
see maps listed in this dialog as well.
| | 00:48 | So, remember that these
spheres indicate materials and the
| | 00:51 | parallelograms indicate maps.
| | 00:54 | So, what I'm looking for is called
Ambient/Reflective Occlusion (3dsmax).
| | 01:00 | So that's what I want.
| | 01:01 | So, I'll double-click on that.
| | 01:03 | That loads it into the Material
Editor's sample slot and I want to assign it
| | 01:09 | to the Projector Map.
| | 01:10 | So, I am just going to drag-and-drop
this over here and choose Instance, so
| | 01:15 | that any changes I make in the Material Editor
will of course be reflected in my Projector Map.
| | 01:20 | So, I just want to do a couple of things here.
| | 01:22 | First of all, I want to give this a name.
| | 01:24 | So, I'll called this AO map and second
of all, the default Max distance which
| | 01:31 | has to do with how far the
ambient occlusion is going to spread.
| | 01:35 | That Max distance is set to 0 by
default, which is a useless value.
| | 01:40 | So, I am going to set it to
something that we can use.
| | 01:42 | Let's say about 2 feet.
| | 01:44 | So, now we are in a good place to
test to see what it's going to look like.
| | 01:49 | So for comparison's sake, I want to
open up my image from my render output of
| | 01:56 | just the ambient light without the occlusion.
| | 01:58 | So, we can see the difference here.
| | 01:59 | So, here it is with ambient_only.
| | 02:01 | Okay, so here is a version that has
no occlusion. Go ahead and do a render.
| | 02:08 | What I want to do here is so we don't
have to wait too long, I am going to knock
| | 02:12 | the Image Precision down and give this a whirl.
| | 02:19 | So although, of course, we're getting a
lot of jagged edges because of the Image
| | 02:24 | Precision set so low, we are seeing now
the effective ambient occlusion if we
| | 02:30 | look at these side-by-side.
| | 02:31 | So, we're getting shading on the wall
here. We're getting an actual crevice here
| | 02:37 | that's being rendered due to the blocking of
ambient light based upon distance. Excellent!
| | 02:45 | So we're well on our way.
| | 02:46 | Next, we're going to tweak this a
little bit to get better quality settings.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting type and samples| 00:00 | So we've got basic scene
wide Ambient Occlusion working.
| | 00:04 | But we want to play around with this
a little bit and get better results.
| | 00:08 | So, I'll go back into the Material
Editor to adjust the parameters of the map.
| | 00:13 | So, here's my AO map.
| | 00:15 | So, the first thing here is the number
of samples. So if you start to see a lot
| | 00:20 | of grain in the shadows, then you
want to increase the number of samples.
| | 00:25 | So, in this case, in this final render
here, I actually increase the Samples to
| | 00:30 | 32 to get better results.
| | 00:33 | So, a valid range for these samples is
between 16 and 64. The default is 16.
| | 00:40 | I find that I pretty much
always need to turn it up.
| | 00:43 | Another important thing to point out
here this time is the type of Ambient
| | 00:48 | Occlusion and what we want here is 0 and
that's going to give the result that we want,
| | 00:54 | which is we're going to be
blocking or occluding the ambient light.
| | 00:59 | So, those are a couple of the
attributes or parameters that you'll need to
| | 01:03 | adjust in your Ambient Occlusion map.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting bright and dark| 00:00 | The next Ambient Occlusion Map Parameters
that we want to look at are Bright and Dark.
| | 00:07 | So, this is pretty obvious.
| | 00:08 | Bright is the color of light in your
Ambient Occlusion Projector Map, and
| | 00:15 | interestingly, this is going to
override the color of your light itself.
| | 00:20 | So, if you tint your light, this
color is actually going to override that.
| | 00:25 | So, if you wanted to tint the ambient
light to produce a certain effect then you
| | 00:30 | could do that by just adjusting this.
| | 00:33 | Dark should be set to the color of
shadows, so generally and typically
| | 00:38 | that would be black.
| | 00:39 | Let's take a look at what would happen
if I set my Bright to some other color.
| | 00:44 | Just by way of illustration, just to
make it really obvious, if I set my
| | 00:48 | Bright color to say supersaturated green,
and we'll see what kind damage we can do here.
| | 00:57 | So as you can see, I've got extremely
intense green splashing on the walls here.
| | 01:04 | So, let's cancel out of that and
maybe reduce my Image Precision.
| | 01:09 | And let's do something more useful,
because you probably wouldn't want
| | 01:13 | something like that.
| | 01:14 | What you'd probably want is to try to
set this Bright color to be the average of
| | 01:20 | all of the reflected light in your scene.
| | 01:23 | So, for example, if I had a room that
had bright red walls, then I'd probably
| | 01:29 | want to set this color to red as well.
| | 01:31 | Or I might want to set it to the general
overall, more or less color temperature
| | 01:36 | of the light. So I could set this to be
maybe a light blue, very light blue, to
| | 01:45 | sort of emulate the effect
of the skylight coming in.
| | 01:49 | Now, of course, we already do have
true blue skylight coming in through the
| | 01:53 | window and we already have actual color
temperature to the sunlight coming in.
| | 01:58 | But again, this is to sort of
emulate the splash. Give that a shot.
| | 02:04 | So you can see it's very, very sensitive.
Even just a very light blue is going
| | 02:09 | to make a huge difference.
| | 02:12 | So, you want this generally to be set
extremely desaturated. Even just a tiny
| | 02:19 | amount of Saturation like a value of
0.1 would probably be more than enough.
| | 02:26 | Give that a shot.
| | 02:32 | So, this is an artistic process once again.
| | 02:35 | It's not photometric in any way and you
just adjust it to whatever looks good to
| | 02:39 | you and that's how you
work with Bright and Dark.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding spread| 00:00 | The next parameter I'd like to show
you in the Ambient/Reflected Occlusion
| | 00:04 | Map is called Spread.
| | 00:07 | Now Spread is not what you think.
| | 00:09 | The name Spread kind of indicates or
implies that it has to do with how far the
| | 00:14 | shadow is going to spread out.
| | 00:18 | Well, that's actually dealt
with through the Max distance.
| | 00:22 | So, Spread is a little bit esoteric and
basically what it is, is an angle value
| | 00:28 | that will allow the renderer to just
search for nearby surfaces and the default is
| | 00:34 | 0.75 in Max 2010, and this is a
rendering with a default spread.
| | 00:39 | So, let me clone this once again so
that we can compare and I am going to set
| | 00:44 | the Spread value very low,
perhaps 0.1. The range is from 0 to 1.
| | 00:52 | So, with a value of 0.1, we are still
getting Ambient Occlusion in this region here,
| | 01:01 | but the look is quite different.
| | 01:04 | It's kind of more focused, if you will.
| | 01:07 | And we could use that in conjunction
with some of the other parameters to get
| | 01:11 | really exaggerated, very strong shadows.
| | 01:15 | But what I recommend in fact is to
either leave the Spread at 0.75 or
| | 01:21 | perhaps turn it up all the way to 1,
which is going to give you a softer
| | 01:26 | look to the rendering.
| | 01:29 | So, with the Spread set to 1 now, we're
getting a softer look than the default of 0.75.
| | 01:37 | So, that's how Spread works.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting max distance and falloff| 00:00 | To get different looks for Ambient
Occlusion, you'll want to adjust the Max
| | 00:04 | distance and Falloff parameters.
| | 00:07 | Max distance is the distance for
sampling, so with the value of 2 feet, if we
| | 00:13 | want to test this surface's occlusion
with nearby surfaces, basically the render
| | 00:19 | is going to look out up to 2 feet away
and anything more than 2 feet away is
| | 00:23 | going to be ignored.
| | 00:24 | So, we want to set this at the sweet
spot so that we'll get a good look but not
| | 00:29 | have to wait too long for rendering.
| | 00:31 | So, if the Max distance is up very high,
then more and more of the scene will be
| | 00:36 | sampled and therefore the
render times will be longer.
| | 00:39 | Also if Max distance is higher, the
end result is that the shadows or the
| | 00:45 | contact shadows are going to
extend farther away from surfaces.
| | 00:50 | So, reasonable values for this are going
to depend upon the scale of your scene.
| | 00:54 | For a room-sized interior, you're
going to want to be on the scale of feet.
| | 01:00 | If you're doing a tabletop scene and a
close-up then you're going to want to set
| | 01:04 | it to somewhere in the range of inches.
| | 01:06 | So, in my experience a range
somewhere between 2 inches to 6 feet is a good
| | 01:11 | range for those scenes.
| | 01:12 | So, I've got it at 2 feet currently.
| | 01:15 | That parameter interacts with the
Falloff parameter and what Falloff does is
| | 01:20 | control how the intensity of this
shadow will diminish over distance.
| | 01:26 | So, with a value of 1, it'll return
a linear falloff or a linear decrease
| | 01:32 | in shadow intensity.
| | 01:34 | So, if we decrease the Falloff value, the
shadows will end up being tighter and smaller.
| | 01:41 | So, let's try a Falloff of 0.5.
| | 01:46 | So, having only change the Falloff now
and not the Max distance, the shadows are
| | 01:52 | definitely much closer to the surfaces.
| | 01:55 | If you increase the Falloff beyond 1,
let's say a value of 5.0, then the
| | 02:01 | result is that the shadows are going to be
darker and in this case, it's fairly dramatic.
| | 02:07 | You'll also see that with the Falloff
increased, we're starting to see some
| | 02:11 | issues with our sampling.
| | 02:13 | So, in this medium shot of the
ceiling joints, with Sample set to 32, we're
| | 02:18 | seeing quite a lot of grain.
| | 02:20 | So, I'd probably want to increase that.
| | 02:23 | And again, this is going to be view dependent.
| | 02:26 | Depending upon how far you are away,
how far your camera is away from the
| | 02:30 | geometry, you might need to
increase or decrease the Samples.
| | 02:34 | For example, if I was out in this wide
shot, which is in this case Camera03,
| | 02:41 | then I might not need the Sample set to
64, because the grain would be so small
| | 02:46 | that we wouldn't notice it.
| | 02:48 | So, I could probably reduce the Samples for a
wide shot back down to 32 and it should be fine.
| | 02:55 | So, that's how you can control the Max
distance and Falloff to get different
| | 03:00 | looks and remembering that you'll also need to
adjust Samples if you've played around with the Falloff.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Excluding transparent and self-illuminated objects| 00:00 | Finally, when working with Ambient
Occlusion, you're going to need to exclude
| | 00:04 | certain objects from the
Ambient Occlusion calculations.
| | 00:08 | Specifically any object that's
transparent or self-illuminated should not
| | 00:13 | occlude the ambient light.
| | 00:15 | So, in this example you can see I've
got a glass tabletop and some glass
| | 00:19 | shelving here and we're getting an
artifact on the wall here where the glass is
| | 00:25 | actually occluding ambient light.
| | 00:27 | So, that would never happen in the real
world because ambient light would pass
| | 00:30 | right through the glass.
| | 00:31 | So, what we want to do here is we want
to exclude these objects from receiving
| | 00:37 | ambient light and also we want to
exclude them from generating ambient occlusion
| | 00:42 | due to the proximity of surfaces.
| | 00:45 | Because AO doesn't understand
anything about the material here.
| | 00:48 | AO doesn't know that
it's a transparent material.
| | 00:51 | It just sees that these two surfaces are
next to each other and generates a shadow there.
| | 00:55 | So this is a two-step process.
| | 00:58 | The first thing I am going to do is
select the light and go to the Exclude
| | 01:03 | button on the Modify panel and then
I want to exclude certain objects.
| | 01:08 | So, what have we got here?
| | 01:10 | I've got my EndTableTop, I'll exclude that,
and then also I've got all these shelves.
| | 01:15 | So, I will select all those,
Shift+Select and exclude all of those.
| | 01:22 | Okay, that's part one.
| | 01:24 | Then part two is excluding these
objects from ambient occlusion just globally.
| | 01:29 | So, I'll go over to this Perspective
view and hit Alt+W to zoom in and what I
| | 01:33 | need to do is I need to set
the object ID for these objects.
| | 01:37 | So, I am going to go ahead and
select all of them, Ctrl+Click on these
| | 01:41 | bookshelves and so now I've got those
six objects selected and then I want to go
| | 01:48 | to the Object Properties.
| | 01:49 | I'll just go to Edit > Object Properties.
| | 01:53 | You can also use the right-click quad
menu and the important thing I want to set
| | 01:58 | here is this mysterious G-Buffer Object ID.
| | 02:02 | So, this is just an identifier for each
object in a scene and what we want to do
| | 02:07 | is set this to any value really.
Every object in your scene has a default
| | 02:11 | Object ID of 0, but I can set this to 1
or any other number that's convenient.
| | 02:18 | Click OK and then I want to
go into the Material Editor.
| | 02:24 | In my Ambient Occlusion Map, you'll
see a mysterious parameter down here,
| | 02:30 | Include/Exclude Object ID (Negative = Exclude).
| | 02:35 | Well, what this is trying to tell us is
we want to put that Object ID number in
| | 02:40 | here and if I put a value of +1 then
that would force the object to be included
| | 02:46 | in the Ambient Occlusion.
| | 02:48 | If I set it to -1, that would force the
object to be excluded from the Ambient Occlusion.
| | 02:54 | So, this is just bit of weirdness in
the interface, but there are a lot of
| | 02:58 | weirdness's in this particular
technique, so this is just one among many.
| | 03:02 | So, inner view, I've set the Object G-
Buffer ID to be 1 and then in the Ambient
| | 03:10 | Occlusion Map settings, I've put a -1
to tell the map to exclude those objects.
| | 03:20 | Go back to my Camera view.
| | 03:22 | Let's go back to our rendered frame window
and I'll just clone this out, so we can compare.
| | 03:29 | So now having done that,
I get a much more accurate result.
| | 03:32 | I don't see those weird shadows on the
wall and that's the basics of how to work
| | 03:37 | with Ambient Occlusion for a
scene-wide fake global illumination.
| | 03:43 | In review, I'd like to show you
the final image file once again.
| | 03:51 | And that's our wide shot with fake GI
and we can do camera walk-through here,
| | 03:57 | and it would render much more quickly
than if we used Final Gather, so that's
| | 04:01 | the real advantage of this.
| | 04:02 | So now you've learned all
about scene-wide Ambient Occlusion.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
17. Volume LightsUnderstanding atmospheres| 00:00 | One thing that mental ray and
photometric lights don't give you is the
| | 00:04 | appearance of a beam of light
actually projecting into your scene.
| | 00:09 | So on the left, you'll see a standard
rendering and I've got three lights on in
| | 00:14 | this particular rendering.
| | 00:15 | I've got my floor lamp and
I've got two track lights.
| | 00:18 | What we'd expect to see is a beam of light
coming out from each one of those track
| | 00:22 | lights because of course, when light
passes through the air, it illuminates fine
| | 00:26 | dust particles and we'll
actually see a beam of light.
| | 00:30 | So, on the right here, I have used a
Volume Light to achieve that effect.
| | 00:35 | Now a Volume Light is completely non-photometric.
| | 00:38 | It's purely a rendering
effect and it's a complete cheat.
| | 00:42 | So you have to actually do a couple of
things in order to make it look good.
| | 00:47 | So what we're going to do in this next
chapter is apply Volume Lights and adjust
| | 00:51 | their parameters in order
to get a good rendering.
| | 00:54 | It will then give us an illusion of a
beam of light traveling through the air.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding a volume light atmosphere| 00:00 | We're going to assign an atmospheric
effect to each one of these two track lights.
| | 00:05 | So I'm going to select one of
them and go to the Modify panel.
| | 00:09 | Scrolling down, I'm looking for the
Atmospheres & Effects rollout and I want
| | 00:14 | to add an atmosphere.
| | 00:16 | So I'll click Add and in this dialog,
I want to choose Volume Light and click OK.
| | 00:21 | Now the Volume Light is attached to
the light and let's do a quick render of
| | 00:26 | this to see what it looks like
from our camera point of view.
| | 00:28 | I've got Final Gather disabled.
| | 00:33 | So this is what you get by
default when you add a Volume Light.
| | 00:36 | Not terribly interesting.
| | 00:38 | We're going to fix this.
| | 00:39 | The next thing I want to do is add
that same atmosphere to the other light,
| | 00:45 | so that I'll have the same parameters for
both and I don't have to do everything twice.
| | 00:50 | So what I'll do for that is
I'll select the other light.
| | 00:54 | Once again, in the Modify panel, go to
Atmospheres & Effects and Add, and
| | 00:58 | this time I'm going to choose Existing.
| | 01:00 | So I've already got an existing Volume Light.
| | 01:03 | So I'm going to go select that and click OK.
| | 01:05 | So now they're both sharing the same
volume parameters and I'll do another
| | 01:11 | render and you'll see we've got this
horrible blue Volume Light, but that's a start.
| | 01:18 | We're going to play around
with this until it looks really good.
| | 01:21 | So that's how you will add Volume
Lights and make sure that they are instanced,
| | 01:25 | so that when you change one,
you'll change them all.
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| Setting exposure physical scale to "unitless"| 00:00 | We've added a volume atmosphere to
both of the lights and as you see, we're
| | 00:04 | getting a very strange result and
this is because of our exposure.
| | 00:08 | So Volume Lights weren't
designed to work with Exposure Control.
| | 00:12 | So what we need to do is make an
adjustment to Exposure Control.
| | 00:16 | So I'll just go ahead and open that
Environment and Effects dialog once again,
| | 00:20 | and scrolling down, what I am
looking for here is in the Exposure Control
| | 00:25 | settings, I've got
something called Physical scale.
| | 00:27 | So what I need to over here is I need
to switch the Physical scale to Unitless
| | 00:32 | and I'll need to adjust the value.
| | 00:34 | So let's see what we get with
a value of 1. Not much change.
| | 00:41 | It's become darker.
| | 00:42 | What I need to do is actually I need to
increase this quite a lot, and this is
| | 00:47 | another one of those non-physical values
that you're just going to have to test.
| | 00:51 | You'll have to try a value, render it,
if you don't like it, go back and do over
| | 00:57 | and lather, rinse, repeat,
iteratively until you get what you want.
| | 01:00 | I've played with this a little bit in
advance and I found a value of 100 worked
| | 01:04 | pretty well for this scene.
| | 01:06 | So we'll go ahead and render that.
| | 01:07 | So now we've got extremely bright
volume lights but at least they are
| | 01:14 | the correct color now.
| | 01:15 | So that's how you'll adjust your
Exposure to compensate for the non-physical
| | 01:20 | nature of Environments and Effects.
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| Adjusting volume light parameters| 00:00 | Now that we've adjusted our exposure so
we'll get these in results from the Volume Lights,
| | 00:05 | let's adjust the Volume Light parameters proper.
| | 00:08 | Once again in Environment and Effects,
I want to scroll down until I see
| | 00:12 | Atmosphere and you'll note that I have
only one listed here, because I chose
| | 00:16 | Existing when I added the second volume light.
| | 00:20 | So that now I can adjust these
parameters globally for both of the lights.
| | 00:24 | So I want to select it and then
scroll down so I can get at its parameters.
| | 00:30 | So a lot of these were designed to
work with the default Scanline Renderer.
| | 00:34 | In fact, the whole thing was designed
to work with the default Scanline Renderer.
| | 00:38 | So some of these things that you might
have used before in terms of attenuation
| | 00:43 | over distance are not going to behave
the same way because with photometric
| | 00:46 | lights, attenuation is automatic.
| | 00:48 | But what I do want to do here at the very
least is reduce the density of the light.
| | 00:53 | So I'll set that to 1 and then do
another quick test render to see what I get.
| | 00:58 | Okay, that's helping.
| | 01:01 | I can also enable the Exponential flag
and that will cause it to fall off with
| | 01:06 | distance a little bit better or rather
the cone will have a better shape to it.
| | 01:12 | Then I can also play around with this End %
value. Set that to less than 100 certainly.
| | 01:20 | I set it to 30% here and
that's actually not too bad.
| | 01:25 | That's pretty much where I want to be.
| | 01:27 | So I'm going to increase my rendering
quality a bit, so I can get a better sense
| | 01:32 | of what this is really going to look like.
| | 01:34 | So as you see, we're getting a
pretty good result with our Volume Lights.
| | 01:38 | Of course, your scene is going to
be different when you're actually
| | 01:42 | creating stuff from scratch.
| | 01:45 | Your exposure is going to be different.
| | 01:46 | Your light intensities
are going to be different.
| | 01:48 | So you're going to need to play around
with all of these parameters in order
| | 01:51 | to get the look that you like, but now
you'll understand how to go about that process.
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| Adding noise to the volume light| 00:00 | The last thing we want to do with this
atmospheric effect is to add a little bit
| | 00:03 | of noise to it because in the real-world,
the whole reason that we have a beam
| | 00:09 | of light in the first place is because
the light is catching dust and particles
| | 00:13 | in the air, and what we're seeing here
is a very regular shape to the cone and
| | 00:17 | it's got no variation inside it
and so it's not terribly believable.
| | 00:22 | It's looking very computer generated to me.
| | 00:24 | So let's add a little bit of noise to this.
| | 00:26 | So I'm going to open up the Environment
dialog once again, scroll back down to
| | 00:32 | the Atmosphere, select it and here at
the bottom of that dialog, I've got Noise.
| | 00:39 | So I need to turn it on and I'll also
need to increase the Amount because a
| | 00:43 | value of 0 will show no result.
| | 00:46 | So the Amount ranges from 0 to 1.
| | 00:48 | Let's try with a value of 1 and do a
test render with Final Gather turned off
| | 00:53 | and Draft Precision to our Antialiasing,
just to get a sense of what we're getting.
| | 01:00 | What's happened here is that the noise
is almost completely masking the cone of
| | 01:05 | the atmosphere, and that's because the
Amount is turned up all the way and the
| | 01:10 | Size is very large relative to my scene.
| | 01:12 | So I'm going to reduce the Size
down to a value of 1 and re-render.
| | 01:18 | So now I've got some speckles
here in the cone, in the atmosphere.
| | 01:24 | So what I want to do here now is to
reduce the Amount, because I'm just
| | 01:28 | getting too much contrast.
| | 01:30 | So again, it ranges from a value of 0
to 1, so I'll try a value of about 0.7
| | 01:38 | and give that a try.
| | 01:39 | So I'm thinking that looks pretty
good and all I need to do now at this
| | 01:45 | point is re-enable Final Gather and
crank up my Image Precision, so I've got
| | 01:50 | Final Gather turned off.
| | 01:52 | Turn that on and turn my Image
Precision backup and do another rendering.
| | 01:57 | Now that rendering took at least five
minutes to calculate, so actually I'll
| | 02:01 | just show you the image
file after it's completed.
| | 02:04 | Once again, so you might render output
folder of the project I've got a version
| | 02:10 | with the Volume Lights turned on.
| | 02:13 | And there you go. We've got a nice
subtle noise and it's getting a good illusion
| | 02:18 | of a beam of light traveling through
the space and that's how we use a Volume
| | 02:22 | Light to add realism to the scene.
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18. Lens EffectsUnderstanding lens effects| 00:00 | The last chapter in our series on 3ds
Max mental ray is devoted to Lens Effects.
| | 00:07 | And this is just a little bit of the
icing on the cake so that we can get the
| | 00:10 | effect of a little bit of glow or a lens
flare around a light source, and Lens
| | 00:16 | Effects are truly a post process.
| | 00:19 | They're calculated in 2D and
basically placed onto the top of the rendering
| | 00:24 | after mental ray has done all of its work.
| | 00:27 | Another thing that you need to know
upfront here about Lens Effects is that
| | 00:30 | mental ray will actually throw up an
error message when you try to render
| | 00:34 | these Lens Effects.
| | 00:36 | It's actually not a problem and it
works just fine, so we're going to safely
| | 00:40 | ignore those errors, but I just want to
warn you upfront that you're going to see that.
| | 00:44 | So that's the idea behind Lens Effects,
and next we're going to actually add a
| | 00:48 | Lens Effect to the lights in our scene.
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| Adding a lens effect to a light| 00:00 | To get started with Lens Effects,
we can apply lens effects to a light and
| | 00:05 | in fact, we can also apply lens
effects to geometry, but in this case,
| | 00:10 | we're just going to apply it to existing lights.
| | 00:13 | So I'm going to select my Spotlight and
just like we did with the atmospheres,
| | 00:16 | I'm going to scroll down and I'm looking
for the Atmospheres & Effects rollout and
| | 00:21 | once again, I'll click Add and I want
to go for any kind of New, not Existing,
| | 00:27 | Lens Effects because we don't have any yet.
| | 00:29 | So I'll choose Lens Effects and click OK.
| | 00:32 | And then once again, I can go into
the Setup, which is going to load the
| | 00:35 | Environment and Effects dialog.
| | 00:37 | So, so far we've only seen the
Environment tab within this dialog but there is
| | 00:41 | also the Effects tab and you'll
see we have a Lens Effects currently.
| | 00:45 | Now at this time, there
are no Lens Effects applied.
| | 00:49 | There is a Lens Effects plug-in
active but it has no components.
| | 00:54 | So over here on the left, you'll
see all these different types of Lens
| | 00:56 | Effects components that can be added to this
particular instance of the Lens Effects plug-in.
| | 01:03 | So on the left are all our options.
| | 01:05 | On the right is everything
that we currently have added.
| | 01:08 | So we currently have nothing.
| | 01:09 | So I'm going to select Glow and then
click this arrow to send it over to
| | 01:14 | the right-hand side.
| | 01:15 | So now I've got a Glow active within
this Lens Effects plug-in, which is
| | 01:20 | applied to this light.
| | 01:21 | So I'm going to go over to 3ds Max and
take a look from the point of view of my
| | 01:27 | main camera and I'm going to open up
the rendered frame window and let's see
| | 01:33 | what we get with just the
default Lens Effects settings.
| | 01:37 | I'll do a Final Gather turned off with
really low anti-aliasing settings, so we
| | 01:42 | can just get a sense.
| | 01:44 | Now here are the errors I was warning you about.
| | 01:47 | So again don't panic, this is not a problem.
| | 01:50 | It's just saying, Hey, there
are some unsupported features.
| | 01:53 | Now if this bugs you, you can flip
this checkbox off so that it will not open
| | 01:58 | this dialog when it has an error.
| | 02:00 | However, I don't really recommend that
because it might be an important error.
| | 02:05 | At this point these are not important
but in the future, I don't want to miss
| | 02:09 | any important messages.
| | 02:11 | So what I'm going to do is I'm just
going to move this down, so that when it
| | 02:14 | pops up again I won't be bothered by it.
| | 02:18 | So as you can see I've got a Lens Effects Glow
currently and that's how I want to do this.
| | 02:23 | I want to go ahead and add it through
the Atmospheres & Effects rollout within
| | 02:27 | the Lights Modify panel.
| | 02:29 | In a moment we will adjust the
parameters of this, but first I want to also
| | 02:32 | assign that Lens Effect to the other light.
| | 02:35 | So I'll go ahead and select the other
light and once again go to Atmospheres &
| | 02:39 | Effects rollout and Add and this time,
I want to go for an Existing Lens
| | 02:45 | Effects, so one that's already in the scene.
| | 02:47 | I'll click that Lens Effects and then
click OK and then we'll do another render.
| | 02:52 | Now you see we've got two glows.
| | 02:57 | You notice that it actually
really does it in a post effect.
| | 03:02 | It'll render the entire scene in
mental ray and then in fact the default
| | 03:06 | Scanline Renderer is invoked after the
effect and it slaps this 2D effect on top
| | 03:12 | of the existing render that
we've created in mental ray.
| | 03:15 | So that's how you'll add
Lens Effects to a light.
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| Adjusting lens effect globals| 00:00 | So you've got a basic effect here.
| | 00:02 | It's not really what I want just
yet, but we're working towards it.
| | 00:06 | The next thing I want to point out to
you is there is a rollout here labeled
| | 00:10 | Lens Effects Globals and the way
this works is you can have multiple Lens
| | 00:16 | Effects elements applied.
| | 00:18 | So each one of these could potentially
be attached to the Lens Effects plug-in
| | 00:23 | that's currently active.
| | 00:26 | This Globals rollout will effect any
and all of the Lens Effects elements.
| | 00:33 | Currently I just have a Glow element.
| | 00:34 | Later, I'm going to add a Star
element and the Size parameter and Intensity
| | 00:39 | and all of these are going to affect all
of the elements in the current Lens Effects.
| | 00:46 | So if I set this Size down to a lower
value like 50 and do another render, then
| | 00:53 | you'll see it's going to be
half the size that it was.
| | 00:57 | Something to speed the process,
up here at the top we have Interactive.
| | 01:02 | So this is pretty cool.
| | 01:03 | If you flip this switch on and then you
play around with any of the Lens Effects
| | 01:07 | parameters whether they'll be global
or specific to a particular element,
| | 01:12 | that'll update in real-time.
| | 01:14 | And of course, that's going to depend
upon the speed of your computer and the
| | 01:17 | complexity of the effects that you have.
| | 01:19 | But this is pretty good because it's
almost immediate feedback and I can
| | 01:24 | reduce the Intensity.
| | 01:27 | So if I have a small Size and a small
Intensity, then we can kind of dial that in. Cool!
| | 01:36 | So that's the basic concept of
how Lens Effects Globals work.
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| Setting glow element parameters| 00:00 | Now let's play around with
the Glow Element parameters.
| | 00:04 | For example, the color is
not really accurate here.
| | 00:07 | I have got kind of an orange light
coming from my incandescent lamp, but
| | 00:10 | I've got this red light coming from the glow effect.
| | 00:14 | So, let me scroll down and here's the
Glow Element rollout and here you'll see
| | 00:20 | we've also got a Size parameter and
Intensity parameter and this is specific
| | 00:25 | to just this one Glow Element and that is
going to interact with the global setting.
| | 00:31 | So, if I reduce the Size
here it'll become much smaller.
| | 00:35 | Now, we also got Intensity here.
Push that up or down and I've still got
| | 00:40 | Interactive Mode turned on.
| | 00:43 | So that as I adjust the Intensity
here we can see what's happening.
| | 00:47 | Occlusion, what that does is that if
the light is hidden behind a surface then
| | 00:54 | it will be dimmed down.
| | 00:55 | But currently my lights are actually
visible to the camera so the Occlusion is
| | 00:59 | not going to do anything.
| | 01:01 | We also have Use Source Color here
and the idea here is that it's going to
| | 01:06 | derive the color of the
glow from the light itself.
| | 01:10 | So if I turn this up to 100, it's supposed
to take the lights color and plug that in.
| | 01:15 | However, because this is mental ray
and we've got exposure control,
| | 01:19 | it's not really accurate.
| | 01:21 | It's not really giving me the same color
as I have for the light and the atmosphere.
| | 01:26 | So I don't want to use the Source
Color in this case. Instead I want to play
| | 01:30 | around with these color
swatches here, these Radial Colors.
| | 01:33 | This left-hand swatch is the center
of the Glow effect and the right-hand
| | 01:38 | swatch is the edge.
| | 01:40 | So, that's why we're getting this kind
of pinkish look because it's blending
| | 01:43 | between white and red.
| | 01:45 | So if I change this red color to
something more of sort of a desaturated orange
| | 01:50 | because I have Interactive Mode turned
on, I can actually try to match that to
| | 01:55 | my atmosphere color.
| | 01:56 | Again, I can also play around with
the inner part of the Radial Color,
| | 02:01 | the center and that'll actually
be a more dramatic effect.
| | 02:04 | So again, I just want to try to match
that to my scene and that's pretty good.
| | 02:10 | So, that's how you can adjust
some of the Glow Element parameters.
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| Adding a star element| 00:01 | And now the last step in our process
for adding these Lens Effects is I want to
| | 00:06 | add a different element.
| | 00:07 | So I got my glow in there but I can
also apply all these other elements, we've
| | 00:12 | got Ring and Ray and Star
and so on. So we'll try Star.
| | 00:15 | I'll go ahead and send that over
and suddenly now we've got stars.
| | 00:19 | Because again I've Interactive
turned on, so it's instantaneous.
| | 00:23 | So now I scroll down and I've got
my Star element rollout visible.
| | 00:28 | So it depends upon which element you
have chosen. Just try to do this so if I
| | 00:33 | choose Star, then I'll see the Star
element and if I choose Glow I'll see the
| | 00:39 | Glow Element parameters.
| | 00:40 | So I'll go back to Star and you'll
see Source Color is turned up to 100% by
| | 00:45 | default and again, we're
going to have to cheat this.
| | 00:47 | So I'm going to set the Source Color
down to 0 and I'm going to play around with
| | 00:52 | these Radial Color swatches just as before.
| | 00:58 | I'll reduce the Size as well, bring
that way down and the Width of the Star,
| | 01:05 | I can bring that down too,
because I want it to be pretty subtle.
| | 01:07 | I don't want it to be calling
attention to itself too much.
| | 01:11 | Now once again, these are also
interacting with the global settings.
| | 01:16 | So if I went back up to the Lens
Effects Globals and increase the Size,
| | 01:20 | it's going to increase the size for both
the Star and the Glow Element and thanks
| | 01:25 | to Interactive Mode, I can actually kind of
see what I'm doing pretty quickly and easily.
| | 01:30 | I can adjust this Angle value too,
either globally or in the Star element.
| | 01:35 | That's looking pretty good.
| | 01:36 | You know I can spend some more time on
this and get it a little bit better, but
| | 01:39 | I think that's good enough for now.
| | 01:41 | I'll go ahead and turn my Image
Precision back up and I'll turn the Final Gather
| | 01:47 | back on with my custom
settings and let's do a final render.
| | 01:52 | I'll turn this up all the way
actually. And now our rendering is just about
| | 01:56 | finished and as we see that last
little bucket of mental ray finishes
| | 02:02 | rendering and when that's finished then
we will see the Lens Effects pop on as
| | 02:08 | that 2D post effect takes effect in result.
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ConclusionGoodbye| 00:00 | We've come to the end of our course in 3ds
Max Lighting and Rendering with mental ray.
| | 00:05 | I hope you've learned a
lot and enjoyed this course.
| | 00:07 | I'm Aaron Ross and thank you once again.
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