Rendering problem

sil7erfo}{

I'm new to Max, I have 7 and have been using it for about a month now. I'm currently rendering a scene that is a motorcycle shop, but nothing looks right at all. The .avi is washed out with white when I watch it. I tried to change a bunch of stuff that I didn't know what it was and changed the renderer to mental ray but it didn't make anything better. Mental ray's renderings are too dark to see. What am I doing wrong?

ScoobyDoofus

It will be difficult to diagnose your problems with no images. Try to render out some still frames, showing this problem, and present them here for people to review.

Switching from the Default scanline renderer to mental ray is not a good solution to gamma adjust your rendered video.

sil7erfo}{

Here's a screen shot of one still and the wireframe. The still shows another problem that I can't seem to fix. What's supposed to be yellow paint in the parking lot is a black hole. I don't understand why. I tried to take a [ctrl + print screen] however the pic of the movie didn't show up in the bitmap that I ended up with.

Mark Dygert

So... what should be yellow is see-thru? Check and make sure the texture doesn't have an alpha chanel. Are you painting the yellow parts on a texture then applying that to a sinlge plane?

Eric Chadwick

Hey that looks like a cool shop.

It would really help your render if you set the attenuation for those Omnis. Just the one streetlight in the foreground there is probably blasting out the whole scene, not to mention what looks like five more Omnis in the rear of the wireframe. Probably also the interior lights too. Attenuation helps limit the range of each light.

If you want a sunlight-kind of look, look into using a Direct light instead, and you could add a Skylight for your bounce light (instead of using Ambient). Or if you're going for a night setting, then the attenuated Omnis should help a lot.

When rendering to an AVI, most people render to a sequence of TGAs first, then convert that to an AVI afterwards. It's easier to fix any bad frames, and if your machine dies in the middle of rendering an AVI you usually lose the whole thing, but if it's TGAs you can start over from where it left off. Saves a lot of time.

sil7erfo}{

I've tried changing the attenuation on the omnis. I went all the way down to .005 on some of them, then deleted most of them to see if it made a big difference. I couldn't tell anything. There's so much stuff in the omnis to change, that I couldnt figure out what did what. I changed the near/far atten, and the decay, shadows, all kinds of stuff, but it all looked the same in the end.

To make the texture, I did it in Photoshop then applied the bitmap as the diffuse color of the asphalt material in the materials editor. I didn't know how else to do it, and since I've only just begun to use this prog that's how my professor told me he would have done it.

I think from now on I'm gonna go to pix instead of avi from Max b/c I don't want to have my pc shut down and lose everything. Especially since the last 45 sec avi I rendered took me 72 hours. How do I put the tga's or jpg's together to make a movie out of them once I've rendered the bunch of them?

Rick Stirling

Max's RAM player will load a sequence of files and export them as any other format, including AVI.

I'd TAKE every light out of your scene, the render on the scanline rendered to see what you are getting. post a shot of that, and we'll see if we can elp you further.

sil7erfo}{

Thanks again for all the help. I know this knowledge comes with just working with the program, but there's just soo much stuff here. I tried what you told me, took every light out. Here's what it looks like: ...It's beautiful.

sil7erfo}{

I figured out the problem. It seems that Nvidia knew about this too. The new drivers are conflicting with Media Player 10 and everything appears washed out and NO video will play right. I installed Max and updated the drivers all at once so it took me a while to figure it out.

Just wanted to let everyone know. ;-)

KDR_11k

Ah, WMP10 is the problem. I was already wondering why those drivers gave everyone else problems with WMV playback but didn't affect me.