Max/Mentalray Final Gather question

SilentMobius

My texturing skills are terrible my my low poly mesh stuff is almost up to scratch now. Once I've UVW mapped my meshes I like to bake on a texture for the skinners to use as lighting reference (also so I can pimp without needing a skin) Now I finally have access to a machine with max 7 (though its not my work machine so I'm only really going to use it for baking) so I can bake using the mentalray renderer and was wondering about that gritty matte material that I see people pimp with (I believe its Final Gather and/or GI) I'm tried to play around with the settings and read up a little on the mechanism but I can't seem to get anything with that course grain and subtle matte that I keep seeing.

On to the question, can anyone reccomend FG or GI settings that will get me close to that "archetectuaral" feel or perhaps point me at a resource that might help?

KDR_11k

If you ask me that's a default material with a GI/AO solution thrown at it. I'm not sure what MAX GI does but I know that Blender's Ambient Occlusion looks almost the same.

SilentMobius

My problem is I don't know where to start. Is the grainyness due to a low amount of photons, or a high amount of photons, or perhaps caustics need to be enabled, do I need a dedicated caustic emitter? Once I get something close to what I want I'm happy to play with the parameters and learn what does what, but right now I can't seem to get anywhere even with most of the mentalray options switched on and a combination of photometric and standard lights in the scene with photon emission switched on.

Here are some example from the "What are you working on" thread (I'm going to post link and quote the owner to make sure I don't upset anyone)

dcon
http://www.planetquake.com/kabalarena/images/wip_purge2k4.jpg

oDD
http://img145.exs.cx/img145/690/05waltherp22render4sn.jpg

Well that was it for that thread, I hope you can see what I mean

Thermidor

Im having the same trouble , there is a lack of info about on this ...

FatAssasin

The easiest way to do this in Max is to
- put your model on a plane
- add a skylight to the scene (anywhere, it doesn't matter)
- turn on Light Tracer (Rendering > Advanced Lighting > Light Tracer)

The defualt settings on the skylight and light tracer will work fine. If you want it to render faster, lower the number of Rays/Samples in Light Tracer, and raise the number for Subdivide Down To:.

Try increasing the Bounce number in Light Tracer to 1 or 2 for more realistic results.

You can add a regular light to the scene with Diffuse turned off and Specular kept on if you want some specular highlights.

You can add an HDR map to the skylight for more natural lighting. Be sure to instance the map to the Mat Editor and change it to Environ and Spherical Mapping (or whatever kind of mapping the HDR map was made to use). You might also have to turn up the multiplier on the skylight and increase the settings in the Light Tracer to get good results.

Hope that helps.

Thermidor

argh , sounds complex i wish i could pick the brains of somone who knows how to do this. (in Maya, although im sure its no different really)

Daz

Erik: I find the tuts from jozvex very easy to understand. This one is basically how I learnt how to use FG in Maya and mental ray:

http://www.jozvex.com/tutorials/fg.html

( it might also help you silentmobius. It is not Max but it's still mental ray and the principles are the same )

Thermidor

Thnx Daz