3DS MAX 2017- ART Renderer

Zitch

I've been messing around with the new ART renderer in 2017, trying to get some nice renders of some models that I made for print at work. Finding little tutorials so far online. Anyone get a chance to play with this yet and make it work well. If so, any tips or cool new features.  

musashidan

I've messed with it a bit, mostly testing the new shader as it has metal/rough channels. It's an extremely simple renderer to use, as is the case with most unbiased engines. Because it's unbiased there are no settings to worry about really. You just stick a few lights in the scene, build your shaders, set the quality slider, hit render. It really is that straightforward.

rollin

Imo it works wonderful with a few area lights and the physical material. Nice results after a short amount of render time. Beside that I can only recommend to setup the scene as you would for a real world photo shooting and then also use a physical camera with real values you would use and add an hdr render environment background sphere to get IBL. 
It's such an simple setup each rendering artist would laugh at you but it spits out better images then max would produce all the years before without fiddling hours and hours on render setup values.

ElleKitty

I've been using it almost exclusively since 2017 hit. There's very little settings to worry about. The quality setting is "Signal to Noise Ratio", so if you set it to 20.0 db, you are basically asking to get "20 part clear, 1 part noise". Choose Fast Path Tracing instead of Advanced. Advanced may have some benefits, but the light bounces so much less that I havent yet found a situation where it works better. Set the noise filtering to either 50% or 75%. I found that 75% ends up being a sweet spot for most of my scenes. Antialiasing diameter is set to 3.0 pixels, and changing it to much-anything-else will probably worsen the image. Dont bother setting up shadows on your lights; ART does its own shadows no matter your settings. That said, with the new Physcial Material you can very very easily make object-lights, which is not bad, not bad at all! To the point that I think that ART treats object-light as no lesser than proper direct lights, unlike Mental Ray. HDRI also works pretty well, I usually light all of my ART scenes with some HDRI until I start adding lights later.

Physical Material works very well with it. You need to know how some physical properties work, though. For example, Subsurface Scattering takes from Diffuse. If you set SSS amount to 1, diffuse will be invisible. Self-illumination takes from both. Reflection and refraction, in turn, take from them.

I also found that ART works better than IRAY. Partly because it supports CPU better (IRAY doesnt use all CPU but shows 100% anyway, probably throttled because nvidia wants you to buy its cards if you want efficiency), and partly because of its smoothing capabilities which Iray doesnt have.

I dont know what else to type since there are so little settings to try out =P . I guess, set around 16db when working on drafts, set 22 (and more) when doing finals, and take advantage of the post-smoothing. I do think that great results can be gotten with it. Oh yeah! Direct light is cheap and accurate. Bounced light is inaccurate, and renders longer for every time that it has to bounce. You might have the most noise with tiny light sources and perhaps reflective surfaces. Some of these issues can be reduced by going into Photoshop and using the "Dust and Scratches" (misnamed Clamp, basically) with parameters of 1px radius and the treshold ranging from about 10 to 30.

I do think that it can output excellent results. This first one was made using A&D shader in Mental Ray. When I got ART, I rendered with it without switching all the shaders to Physical. So this is all A&D here. The light is provided by sun and environment map, which should be actually very inefficient, but somehow ART went over it faster, and came up with a better result. Dont mind the slight differences in the scenes, I minorly edited some of the curtains, but all that matters is the same, lights, intensities, angles, shaders. All of these are straight out of Max, no further image-editing was done.

MR, 3-5 minutes, I forgot:


IRAY, 45 minutes of grinding!! And it's still of unusable quality.


ART, 1 minute, no smoothing:

ART, 1 minute, 50% post-smoothing filter:

ART, 5 minutes, no smoothing:

ART, 5 minutes, 50% post-smoothing filter:


ART, 5 minutes, 75% post-smoothing filter, all lit with the blue HDRI and the giant mounted lamp on top (no lights, there are only illuminant textures in this scene, yet look at the shadows):


I say give it a chance, it's worth it! At least it's tiding me over (very nicely so) until Corona starts supporting Physical Material, and allows showing maps in the viewport.

ab3d

High! I 'm new to poly count and just signed up to talk to about this....
I just started using the Art Renderer and noticed there is a "sun" like light in the scene by default.  Can anyone help me understand how to control this? (Most of my lighting/material creation experience is with Maxwell)

My scene is basic primitives using a Physical Cam and physical material with default settings.... 

Mr Whippy

I've been tinkering with this ART renderer a bit and it's REALLY impressed me for it's speed, interactivity, accuracy, integration etc. I think this is an absolutely amazing rendering system to go alongside the standard scaline renderer. Right now I could see why lots of people would just hop to this right away. Everything just works like MR or Scaline, all the composite maps, built in procedurals etc... but with top notch PBR workflow, and none of the annoying 'tweaky' settings of biased renderers. I really hope Autodesk embrace it and enhance it from here because it'll be stunning if so. They just need to fill in annoying missing features like rounded corners which are essential for CAD renderings... get that feature in there and I'm struggling to see what 'day to day' jobs this renderer can't just do better than anything else out there! Nice work AD. Now all you need to do is make Max 'buyable' again, because for now Max 2017 is actually the first version I've wanted to buy to keep for myself at home since 2010, and I can't! Own goal!