From the course: 3ds Max: Substance to V-Ray

Scene setup - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max: Substance to V-Ray

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Scene setup

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- [Instructor] When working through any kind of render engine base training, it is always good to know a little bit about how either the models or the scenes being used in the presentation have been setup given that this can often times help with our understanding of how things are working in the rendering pipeline. Although, our setup here is, for the most part, pretty straightforward. For scene lighting, we are working with V-Ray Sun, which of course can be added from the V-Ray section of the Create Lights tab with the only modification being that we have disabled its ability to affect the specular aspects of materials. This means that we're going to be relying on purely reflection information for highlights and such in the scene. We also have a V-Ray light running in dual mode that is using a HDRI so as to add just a hint of outdoor coloration to our scene. In the camera view, we essentially have three currently untextured elements that we will be working to dress up as we progress through the course. These being our ground, wall, and robot character, Geometris. Now, the robot itself is, of course, a modeled object and was created right here in 3ds Max by my fellow Lynda author Joel Bratlin. Whereas the wall and ground objects are just simple, plain primitives, although the ground has been collapsed, sub-divided, and had a noise modifier applied to it in order to generate a little undulation. The tree geometries, which were added to cast some shadows into the rendered frame, giving the impression of a larger world existing off screen, are again just 3ds Max primitives taken, this time, from the ADC, extended, and foliage sections in the Create tab. These don't have anything like a complete material applied as all we really needed here was some basic colors, again, just to throw a little color into the scene. They also have an alpha map so as to give us a bit of a leaf-shape in the shadows. The rock objects were also created here in 3ds Max, and, themselves, have a substance base material applied to them. Regarding render settings, our GI is being generated using the V-Ray 3.5 defaults of brute force and light cache with all of their settings left at defaults. Whilst the image sampling is being handled by the progressive engine, on which I have set a time limit of 2.5 minutes for each of the renders that we will be taking here. The minimum shading rate has been set to one. The noise threshold has been set to a production-quality setting of 0.005. And the image filter type has been set to V-Ray Triangle. And, I think that is pretty much it. Oh, our physical camera here is using a 40 millimeter lens and has an EV target of 13.5 so as to give us the exposure that we want. Now, of course, you can feel free to change any and all of these settings if you want, and do some experimentation with the look of the scene. Do keep in mind, however, that if you do that, your visual results will no longer match up to the scene in the videos as we work together through this course. With all of that covered, then, we can move into the body of our course, and give ourselves an overview of just what we mean when we talk about working with algorithmics physically based substance rendering tool set.

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