3ds Max Rendering Adjust ART Physical Sun and Sky

3ds Max Rendering Adjust ART Physical Sun and Sky To compensate for that, we can reduce the global intensity. Over here, we'll set that to a value of 0.1. And it still looks a bit overexposed in this material preview. However, we are not actually rendering the sky as a background in this case. We don't really care what the sky looks like, all we care about is how it looks on these surfaces here. With those values entered, I'll do a test rendering. Go into the Render Setup dialog. ART is our current renderer, and I've got a target quality of, once again, 28 decibels. Click "Render". Here is the end result with a sky intensity of 30 and a global intensity of 0.1. There is almost no direct sunlight in this version of the render. The light is coming from everywhere in the sky. And so we have almost no shadows whatsoever.

3ds Max Rendering Daylighting with ART Sun Positioner

3ds Max Rendering Daylighting with ART Sun Positioner Our sun positioner is active and we're seeing lighting in the scene. Let's select that sun positioner, and to do that, you need to click on the compass rose, it's easiest to do that in the top viewport. Go over to the modify panel now, We can adjust the sun positioner parameters, I'm going to use manual as my mode of placement. Down here under sun position, set it to manual, and now we can enter in degree values for the azimuth and the altitude. Scroll down a bit, Horizontal coordinates, azimuth and altitude. You can't actually click and drag on these spinners, but you can click and hold, and that will move it in one degree increments, you can see how my sun is rotating here when I adjust the azimuth. I'll set that to a value of 300 degrees, and we have the altitude, which is the height in the sky. Again, we can click and hold the mouse to adjust in one degree increments. I know I want a value here of 40 degrees, so I'll type that in altitude of 40 degrees. Because I have a physical camera in my scene, I want to use physical exposure. When I created the sun positioner, that got enabled, just silently behind the scenes. Let's go check it out in the rendering menu. Exposure control, exposure control is currently set to physical camera.

3ds Max Rendering Introducing the ART renderer

3ds Max Rendering Introducing the ART renderer That is not possible with ART, and in fact, you have no control over things like the density of shadows. That is all determined by the number and position and intensity of lights in your scene. So, you don't really have the impressionistic power that you have with a renderer like Mental Ray, but you have much faster setup than you would with something like Mental Ray. You, basically, drop your lights into the scene, set the intensity according to the real luminance that they would have in the real world, and use the physical material on all of the objects. Once you have all of those things lined up, the rendering will come out nearly photo real with very little work on your part. The advantages of ART are that it's easy to set up, and that it produces high quality photo real results. On the minus side, the disadvantages are that you have less creative ability. You can't achieve certain effects in ART. Also, the render times can be very long. Mental Ray or V-Ray are going to be faster in most cases, but you're going to spend more time setting them up. On the topic of creativity, or art directing a shot, we notice as this is rendering, that we're getting a pretty hard edged shadow here, and that's occurring because I have point lights in the scene, and they're not really point lights, because they have to have some volume or area for the purposes of ART.It's not really fast enough for doing animation at this point. You can also bump up the quality a little bit by enabling Noise Filtering here, and the default strength of 50% is a good balance, because if you have it up too high, it might cause some banding, and you'll lose some detail. So, I'm gonna kick this off once again, and it's going to take quite a long time to render this, but we'll take a look at it once it's finished. Now that rendering is completed, we can take a look at it. It has a target quality of 32 decibels. We've also enabled Noise Filtering with a 50% strength. That's the basics of setting up the ART Renderer. As we've seen, there aren't very many options to worry about, but once again, the render times can be long.

3ds Max Materials and Mapping Shading with the Physical Material

 3ds Max Materials and Mapping Shading with the Physical Material And once again, select the node in the material editor and click assign material. We're ready to do another test render. Once again, give focus to the physical camera. And render production. And this will take longer, because it's calculating the reflections of these physical materials. Once that's completed we can see that we're getting some shiny highlights on this polished aluminum. Alright, back to our material editor and I just wanna talk a little bit about these parameters. If we go back and forth between this stairs material and the physical material and look at the parameters we will see that the main things that have changed are the roughness and the metalness.

 3ds Max Materials and Mapping Shading with the Physical Material For this polished wood we've got a roughness of .64 and a metalness of zero. For the polished aluminum we have a roughness of .29, a lower roughness, and a metalness of one. Because this is a physical simulation of a material the most important property in determining the size and intensity of highlights is the roughness. The aluminum material is a good example of that, because I can change the roughness and see how that affects the reflections. Set the roughness down to zero and we get a highly polished perfect mirror here. If I set the roughness up to one then I get a perfectly ideal diffuse material. That's the most significant parameter here of all. As the name implies, metalness controls the amount of metallic property this material will have. And with a value of one it will be a complete metal and with a value of zero it will have no metal. 3ds Max Materials and Mapping Shading with the Physical Material

3ds Max Materials and Mapping Editing UVs with Unwrap UVW brushes

3ds Max Materials and Mapping Editing UVs with Unwrap UVW brushes All right, I'll undo that with Ctrl + Z. If I just wanna make some adjustments to the UVs here without creating too much distortion, then I might want to have a Strength of near zero. Hold down Shift and drag and make that a very small circle. And that way we're gonna have a very soft influence over our resulting UVs. I'll undo that. And then we can also change the Falloff Type. The default is Linear. I think the best one actually is Smooth. And with a very low Strength and using the Smooth Falloff Type, I'm getting a pretty good result here. I'm not seeing weird stretching as I move things around. All right, undo that. So, this is for touch-up work, obviously. And it uses a form of soft selection allowing you to interactively adjust the UV placement in a sort of organic way. The other tool we have is Relax. And it's really the same tool that you would find in the menus here under Tools, Relax. The Relax Tool will operate on the entire object or on selected UVs. The brush implementation, of course, is interactive. So let's try that. We've got a couple different options. The default one, Relax By Polygon Angles, I think, is actually the best option. So we'll use that. I'll navigate in the view here and go to an area that's got a bit more variation. Here in the middle, around 0.5. And click and hold down the mouse. And as long as you hold down that mouse, you're relaxing the mesh. Eventually it will converge, and you will hold down the mouse and things will stop moving. You've reached sort of an optimal state for the Relax. And what Relax is trying to do is to equalize the UV space to match the polygon size. Cool, so that's the Interactive Relax. I can undo that with Ctrl + Z. And, of course, adjust my Strength and Falloff values. Maybe make it a much larger circle. Hold down Ctrl, bring that out.

3ds Max Materials Mapping Placing maps : Texture Object Mask

3ds Max Materials and Mapping Placing maps with Texture Object Mask  If I rotate this, I will probably be able to see something. So it's not terribly accurate. Don't trust what you see in the preview here. Definitely do a production render to make sure. And wherever that plane slices through that object, we have a transition between right now just a black and white color. Cool. So I'll restore the rotations to zero. And also set the position to a value of 0.4 meters in the Z axis. Back to the Slate Material Editor, we can make some of these other connections. We've got the noise, we'll assign that to "Texture1". And it takes a moment to update. We can see here now that the noise is appearing on the top half of this little material preview. And then drag the Gradient Ramp, or the Forest Noise, onto "Texture2". Finally, let's just adjust the values of this snow noise here, I'm gonna double-click that. I'll call it "snow" up here. Set its size to 0.5, set the Low value to 0.5 as well, it's going to increase the contrast, and swap the two colors here. Just click "Swap". And now we should have a mostly white material preview there. We'll do another rendering. Go back to our perspective view and click "Render". And you can see here now we've got a transition between the snow material and the ground material, or the forest. Let's render this camera view that I've prepared. Highlight that viewport and do a rendering. Here we can see that we are getting a very unrealistic effect, because we are just simply cutting off at a certain elevation. Back in our Slate Material Editor, we can change this up. Double-click on the Texture Object Mask map. And over here we have Transition Range. That's the softness of the transition between the Above and Below. Set that to a value of 0.3. And then do another render. Now we've got a softer transition there. We can even make this more interesting by varying the shape here, so it won't be a straight line. In the Slate Material Editor, in the Texture Object Mask map, there is a slot here for transition displacement.

3ds Max Materials and Mapping Vector textures with ShapeMap

3ds Max Materials and Mapping Vector textures with ShapeMap All right, very cool, now we've got our vector art applied onto the flag, and once again it is resolution independent, we can zoom in very, very close on Mr. Beaver here, and do a quick rendering, and see how good that looks. Of course, we can edit our original curves as well. So it's all live, we can go, select that object, go into the Modify panel, and select by Spline, drag a rectangle around all of the beaver splines there, grab the scale tool, and then make sure we're scaling around the selection center, not the pivot point, click and drag in the center of the scale gizmo, to scale all of those splines, and notice how we're also scaling that on the flag itself. So there is a lot of connection between the spline object, and the vector art that we have within our shading network. Notice that the thickness of these lines did not increase, that would need to be set in the parameters. Very cool, I'll undo that with Control + Z, and now we've got a regulation flag. I'll exit out of the cell object mode, and that's how to use the shape map to convert a shape or spline object into a map or texture.