Amazing Renders: How?
polycounter lvl 7
And hopefully without taking a week to render a single frame. I'm using 3DS Max, and I've never really had much luck with rendering, light set up, or pretty much anything involving hitting F9.
Because I am so bad at it, for the most part I avoid rendering all together, or just take viewport screencaps. This is really hurting my presentation and portfolio though, but I don't know how to get the really nice high quality renders you see places like here on polycount or cghub.
Does anyone have any good tutorials, tips, pointers, hints, anything about how to do renders, that would be appreciated, because when I try to do anything, all I get is a shitty scene that looks worse then a viewport screencap, that takes six months to render.
Because I am so bad at it, for the most part I avoid rendering all together, or just take viewport screencaps. This is really hurting my presentation and portfolio though, but I don't know how to get the really nice high quality renders you see places like here on polycount or cghub.
Does anyone have any good tutorials, tips, pointers, hints, anything about how to do renders, that would be appreciated, because when I try to do anything, all I get is a shitty scene that looks worse then a viewport screencap, that takes six months to render.
Replies
Tricks:
Don't use a lot of lights. Learn to use lighting correctly.
Reduce your texture to sizes that are specific to your rendering sizes. What i mean is If you are rendering the front of a house which takes up 1/4 of the screen and you're rendering at 1024x768. The texture doesn't need to be any bigger than 512x512 as thats how big it is when it renders. A bigger texture would just be wastful and take longer to render.
Keep the polycount of objects in the scene relative to each other. I remember a friend of mine made street lamps for a scene. The lamp posts were about 500 polys each but each of the bulbs for the lamps were about 5K each!...
I mostly meant the technical aspects of setting up the render itself within all the menus and choosing render types and stuff like that I need help with, tricounts and texture sizes are no problem.
much easier to set up a real time shader IMHO if you are
presenting games work at least
you need to do tests. start small with a teapot and experiment with some feature until you understand what it does.
build you scene slowly light by light.work with a flat shaded then add textures.
don't flip on a bunch of GI and ray tracing features you don't understand. until you understand them.
go get a gnomon video on lighting rendering and compositing.
it can take years to really understand a render like mental ray or prman at a deep level.
Excellent advice. Can't recommend this approach enough.
We have some rendering and lighting links on the wiki, might help you get started.
http://wiki.polycount.com/Model%20Presentation
Do tests on each setting/light/etc. in isolation from other changes (one change at a time), this helps you isolate what each thing is doing. Also render as small as possible when you're tweaking settings, saves a ton of time.
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http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/2204/scifinamed.jpg
It is literally a directional light, and a ambient light in the far hallway to add that bright effect. Then I just made a dark semi reflective surface for the floor, and a lighter non reflective surface for everything else. It takes literally 5 min to set up my materials and lights to get solid looking renders.
I don't use 3DS Max so it might be a tad different, but it has mental ray, so it should be translatable.
Once you have such a target clearly defined, then it's time to ask yourself how to produce the effect - not the other way around.
Working that way makes it surprisingly easy to achieve a wide array of looks. Show us what you want!
In term of software, if you're looking for a really fast (but expensive) solution to render your stuff (not game art related), I'd suggest you to take a look at KeyShot (they have a trial at http://www.keyshot.com/ ). For game art models, there are plenty of game engines out there (UDK, Cry Engine, Marmoset)
Good luck.
To keep iteration times down start at a low resolution 480x360ish and turn down the number of samples until you get the lighting right, then you can crank up all of the "make it pretty" settings. If you are doing a complex scene, render in layers and passes, then composite them in PS/AE. Also, don't be afraid to get it pretty close and then adjust the levels in post.
any relation to Johann Heinrich?
don't get me wrong - understanding all the fancy tricks and what mental ray gi setting does what is certainly nice, but if you just want a pretty-ish render that works for almost all settings with minimal tweaking, then iray makes it easier than anything else.
It solves two main problems, not knowing when it will finish and not knowing what settings to tweak. It still takes about the same time to process quality renders but you save the time you waste guessing settings and trying to balance quality with render time.
It's aimed at giving you a full render and the sharpness depends on how long you let it go. Unlike other renderers that solves bits and pieces and leave holes if you stop it after a min. You can region render but that is like looking at a tapestry with a magnifying glass, its hard to see the hole thing.
If you set iRay to a min it solves the entire image in rough quality, which gives you a lot of info you might be looking for as you work on the scene. Stuff like how is the ambient light level, are materials and reflections working, how does the scene fit together as a whole, are shadows in the right places, how is this one light affecting the whole scene. The longer you let it go, the less fuzzy it will be.
So instead of saying "I want this quality, finish it whenever. I'll wait..."
You are saying "give me everything even if its fuzzy, at least it will be fast".
As you work with lower render times, it helps if you squint.
1min
Long rendering time, probably several hours
"Extended" probably more than 8hrs
So now the difference is time and processing power iRay is also designed to take advantage of your GPU's CUDA cores (sorry ATI) so unlike traditional rendering that leaned heavily on the CPU, iRay will use all of your hardware.
Like divi pointed out it works only with Photometric lights and A&D mats so those take a bit of time to learn and adjust to, but honestly they aren't very hard to learn and they do give more realistic results even if you use only scanline. Don't get me wrong there is a lot you can do with the default lights in max to make them almost as good with less bugs and glitches but you do need to know what you're doing.
Maybe I messed up the HDR part? I went into environment, chose bitmap, and used a *.hdr file that looked like a really warped 3d sphere. If I try to hit cancel to end the render, the whole program locks up and starts to eat more and more memory until my whole computer starts chugging, can't do anything, and comes to a stop.
Even if you don't have any lights in the scene, there is always one max light behind the viewport camera lighting the scene. That light isn't photometric so it won't render correctly.
I'll try adding a light though. Correct me if I am wrong but doesn't the HDR file thing cast some lights or something? If it doesn't, what purpose does it serve beyond something for the metal to reflect?
EDIT: Added a light and tried baking, reaches 100% and just stalls, goes no where. Is there maybe a dialog or something I am supposed to press OK its waiting for that isn't appearing maybe? It feels like its waiting for something. hitting cancel as usual slowly locks up the whole computer. Would seeing the scene file help maybe? Or should I try making a new scene from scratch?
EDIT EDIT: The red message came up this time!
IRAY 0.8 1206 MB error: not enough memory on device 0, not using this device for rendering
It didn't do that last time. I have lots of ram so I don't know what its problem is.
Tried it again with one single flat grey metal A&D and got:
IRAY 0.8 1206 MB error: not enough memory on device 0, not using this device for rendering
IRAY 0.8 261 MB error: CUDA device 0: may not have enough memory available to start CUDA kernel (estimated 474MB)
IRAY 0.8 305 MB error: CUDA device 0: may not have enough memory available to start CUDA kernel (estimated 474MB)
IRAY 0.8 309 MB error: CUDA device 0: may not have enough memory available to start CUDA kernel (estimated 474MB)
IRAY 0.8 324 MB error: CUDA device 0: may not have enough memory available to start CUDA kernel (estimated 474MB)
IRAY 0.8 323 MB error: CUDA device 0: may not have enough memory available to start CUDA kernel (estimated 474MB)
I'm not running anything else, I have loads of unused ram and my CPU isn't maxed on any of my cores so I'm not sure what's happening.
CUDA Cores are specific to Nvidia's video cards, iray is made by the people who make MentalRay which was bought by Nvidia. They created it specifically to work with the CUDA core technology so if you're running ATI you're SOL... Or if your card is old enough to not have CUDA cores then you are also screwed...
Ideally you want a Nvidia video card with least 1gb of video ram and as many CUDA cores as you can afford.
Googling around online some people mentioned CUDA drivers, do I need something special like that to make this work?
I think you are putting to much effort into this program in hopes of getting some nice renders. You do not need professional level ILM type stuff here, you just need to learn to use 3DS Max effectively to show off your models. You have to remember you are not trying to get a rendering or lighting job, so why waste time going way to far in depth into it? Mental Ray in 3DS max can do everything you need, you just have to do a little research to find out how.
Check this realtime viewport shader out - http://www.laurenscorijn.com/viewportshader
Here are some really simple rendering setups that you can play with and setup in only a few mins.
http://www.secondpicture.com/tutorials/3d/clay_render_in_3ds_max.html
http://www.aleso3d.com/blog/?p=379
http://www.cgrats.com/mental-ray-interior-lighting-basics.html
For your game res stuff this is a often recommend program.
http://www.8monkeylabs.com/toolbag
I know I don't need professional level lighting skill or whatever, the whole reason I came here for originally was just some cut and dry straight forward 'Do exactly this, this, and this, and you'll get a nice render.' but everyone insisted its more important to understand the basics from scratch so I went along with that.
They were like iray is simpler and more dumbed down though so I thought that was the right thing to do, because I've never had any luck with mental ray before, it has 100x more settings and options that I don't understand.
Honestly all I want to do is re-render off pieces of my portfolio to look professional when I really don't know what I am doing and I'm really not very smart and I get frustrated and upset easily because nothing works for me.
Your tutorials seem like 30x more complicated with multiple pages and things way above me then anything they were showing but I'll try them out anyways to the best of my ability because I am not getting anywhere with fixing the iray thing on my own.
1 - Assign a standard material to your mesh, you can use some different colors if you want to create diversity. I usually also ramp up the specularity slider and play with the glossiness slider.
2 - Create a Skylight and enable shadows(for scanline, if you are using mental ray or v-ray, dont enable shadows and let Global Illumination handle it instead), I usually take down the intensity down to 0,25-0,5 and change the light color to a pure white. This will give you a clay render.
3 - Create 3 directional lights:
Main Light: Should come from the same direction as your camera and be a bit above it. This light should have a medium intensity(could be around 0,8-1). Could also have a warm color tone.
Fill Light: Should fill out the places main light doesn't hit, low intensity. Usually a neutral color tone. This light can also be skipped and just let the skylight handle this, however I like the control it gives.
Rim Light: Should be behind the object pointing towards the camera and hit the edges of the object to highlight them. This light has a high intensity(can easily be between 1-20) and a cold blue tone.
4 - Test render and play with the values until you hit something you are satisfied with.
5 - If using scanline, and you have the time, you can enable Super Sampling for some crisp edges. ---- Done.