3ds Max: Tips, Tricks and Techniques

- [Instructor] The Arnold Renderer is fully compatible with 3ds Max Particle Systems. And Arnold will render any 3ds Max Particle System just fine. But you have the ability now to use the Arnold Properties Modifier to replace 3ds Max Native Particles with Arnold Point Primitives and that'll give you a little bit better performance because there's no translation needed. And will also give you in some cases a little bit better render quality because the Arnold Point Primitives are not based on polygons. I've got a 3ds Max Super Spray Particle System here and I can just press play and let that run through. I've set it so the timeline doesn't loop then it will stop on frame 100. And let's do an ActiveShade render of this and we can see what it looks like with more or less default particle parameters. We see that the particles are rendering as flat polygon triangles. I'll select those particles, go into the modify panel and scroll down to the very bottom to the particle type rollout. And I change this over for example to sphere. And let that update. And it looks fine from this distance. If we get in really close however, we'll be able to see that those spheres are not actually perfect spheres. They're built out of polygons and they're really kind of low resolution. I'll zoom in there with Control+Alt and middle mouse button. Get in real close on some of those spheres and we can see that a kind of low level of detail polygon objects. Now, let's switch this over to Arnold Points. And we'll do that by adding a modifier, Arnold Properties. And we see that there are two relevant roll-outs here, Particle System and Points. When we enable export particle system as points and also enable the points proper then we will get Arnold Point Primitives. However, at least in this version of 3ds Max and Arnold, the ActiveShade renderer is not necessarily updating every time and so even though I've turned these switches on we don't see any change in the ActiveShade render. So, we'll just need to reinitialize that by clicking ActiveShade once again. And now what we're seeing is the disc primitive. And we can switch that over to something else such as quad and again we may need to refresh the ActiveShade. And now we see we're getting rectangles. And finally we can switch over to sphere and reinitialize the ActiveShade and we'll see now that we're getting perfect spheres. This is an implicit mathematical sphere. It's not made out of polygons. And it will render a little bit more quickly because there's no translation being done. And we can see the difference more dramatically if we just do a side-by-side comparison. I'll clone this rendered frame window out to its own window so we can compare. And then just simply disable the Arnold properties modifier and reinitialize ActiveShade. And when ActiveShade updates, we'll see on the left the 3ds Max native sphere particles which are built out of polygons. And on the right, the Arnold Point Primitive spheres which are mathematically perfect spheres that are not tessellated into polygons. And in fact we could zoom in on those spheres infinitely and they would still be perfect spheres with no facets. That's how to render 3ds Max particles as Arnold point primitives.