Well I don't want to high jack this thread or anything but Patient09 PM'd me asking about the settings I used in particular, and I figured I would just post it here so people can look it up if they have similar questions.
Patient09: If you tell me exactly how you set up your scene and gave me a run down of what you have done it would certainly help.
But I will attempt to explain without that.
First off, I pretty much followed the tutorial exactly. Having one spot light directed on the gun and 1 sky light above (it doesn't really matter where you place a skylight though)
Here is where I deviated from the tutorial a little. I added a rim light aka an omni light behind the gun and up high enough to hit the edges of various details. I made the omni light just a little light blue almost white in color and its strength is 0.4 (I lieft all other settings for this omni on default)
This is a screen grab of my light setup:
Now the one issue I had was that the shadows were coming off pixilated and crappy. I figured out it was coming from shadows that my spot light was making. My solution was to play with the "Shadow Map Params" dialogue in my spot lights settings. I increase the texture "Size" to 2048 (which gives the shadow map more resolution) and the "Sample Range" to 14 (which kind of blends and softens the shadows more). You can see these settings in the image above also.
Furthermore, here is a tutorial I found explaining this: http://www.cglearn.com/tutorials/max3/13_mapping_coords_still_life_part_3.html
The final thing I did to add a little bit more to my render was I rendered an Ambient Occlusion pass and photoshoped it in (I placed the AO render above my original render, set the blending to "Multiply" and set the Opacity to 30% which makes the whole render pop better) Vig actually mentioned somewhere that this was a good idea (he is right!) Then I saved and I was done.
Now the AO render can be a bit difficult to understand if you haven't done this kind of thing before and its an extra step. You should get good renders even without it. But here is how I found the solution to rendering AO, quick and easy. This is just a copy of a discussion of how to do this on another forum, plus I explained a little more in places.
"
There was comment by Glacierise...
"An AO pass is also very easy in mental ray - just create a mental ray material, put the ambient occlusion shader in the surface slot, then put the created material in the material override slot in render settings/processing, and disable exp control."
The terminology can be confusing .. especially what someone means when they say 'shader'. Someone will correct me, but I use it to mean any component you can put in a shader tree, so it can easily be a procedural map, like this one.
(***Follow these steps exactly and it will work***) (Be sure to set your renderer to Mental ray also)
Glacierise means: Select the [mental ray] material - (that's what it's called) and pop it in the material editor. You will see it has a 'Surface' slot. Put the AO map into this slot ("Ambient/Reflective Occlusion (3dsmax)". Then drag the whole material over to the Material Override slot ( in the main Render Settings / Processing tab (Press F10 to open Render Settings)) as an instance, so you can still adjust it back in the material editor. Render away.. every object in the scene will be allocated your new AO material, and you have an AO pass.
"
I didn't make any of this stuff up on my own, so I cannot take credit. It's really all thanks to this thread.
[Edit]
Oh yeah, on the ambient occlusion material (if you want to bake AO also as mentioned above) I increase the Samples to 64 (you should see "Samples:" in the root of that material).
Also if you press F10 for the render setup dialogue, under the "Renderer" Tab there is a section called "Sampling Quality". I changed the "Samples per Pixel" to "Minimum: 1" and "Maximum: 16"
These two settings will greatly improve the quality of your AO render.
Cool stuff Brad, nice write up, nice results too. How long did it take to render at those settings?
What about playing around with a Z Depth Pass also, super quick to render, can be used for a few different things.
Go to render settings > render elements and add a ZDepth element. Render the scene it will spit out a grayscale image like above. Composite that into your shot, like AO or use this as a mask for effects like fog. You can also play with the min max settings to fine tune the depth.
Thanks guys, glad I could add to this already awesome tutorial. I actually made a few mistakes with that sight on the gun and as a result have to re-render the fixed version.
So...
Vig: I'll try that z-depth trick you mentioned. The results look really cool. I have a pretty fast computer (quad core, 2 8800gt's, 8gigs ram) and I don't know much about what exactly it takes to speed up render times; but these renders take about 10 minutes for the main render, and a couple of minutes for the AO render.
[Edit]
Also note in regards to the time: The size I rendered was 2048x2048
Vig: I just had a go with the Z-Depth element (you can see my results on my WIP gun thread if you interested).
Anyways, I can already see that one can get some really nice results with it. I ended up compositing a Z-Depth pass as an Overlay at 40 percent. Thanks again for the tip Vig
So I wanted to test this out. I did a quick render of an old object for a project I was working...not the best model to use but it will do. I really like the results that it gave me. What do you guys think?
Thanks for taking the time to explain your additions to the process Brad.
These are the kind of variations in the setup I was hoping for to give people slightly alternative methods with different results to choose from. I think everything here is looking great guys!
I messed with the material a bit more and was able to get the AO material to render within the shader, doing it this way saves you the trouble of saving out 2 images and having to comp them together in photoshop and still gives pretty much the exact same result. Here is an example, and then a link to my setup below it.
Thanks a lot X-Convict for sharing this, its a pretty awesome setup. Brad and Vig thanks for also sharing your tweaks, both add some cool effects. I finally took some time to play with this, and I am really glad I did . Here is what I came up with.
I pretty much followed the tutorial exactly to get a base then went and changed some values and added falloffs to get some built in rim light effects. After I got that then I used Brad's method to render out an AO pass.
Thanks to everyone for sharing. here were my results from combining a few of the techniques mentioned in this thread so far on this board thingy I started last night.
I learned a lot from this thread, so thanks again to everyone for sharing! awesome stuff.
Tried out this setup ,pretty cool results thus far . The model was inspired by the scimitar assault rifle used in the game section 8 ,concept by Brian [Mac] Smith . I'm making my student portfolio so this is to see how well can i match myself wth the current gen of models .
I'm terribly sorry for bumping this thread but I felt like this belonged here since it's related to the material. I've tested it and got nice results without further tweaking. Now, while I think the render already looks good as it is, I think it lacks contrats. What can I do to remedy this? How do I render an AO pass do fiddle with in post and make it really pop? Thanks in advance.
You could try adding several materials, like the tank has dark tracks(or is that just the shadow?) and white decal thingies.
You can also mess a bit with the light position and brightness to get some lighter colors in there, like getting some more ridges highlighted.
And slightly offtopic, i think you need to make the hood intake a bit less boxy.
felipefrango - It's looking good, I was going to say pretty much what Snader already pointed out - several materials to break up your values, brightness of your light(s) and intensity of your shadows, and even adding a brightness/contrast post effect. I also believe that BradMyers had a post with an added AO method HERE
OK, I've fiddled with it some more on this model I did a while ago. While I'm pretty happy with the results, I'm getting pretty choppy shadows, as evidenced in the third pictures. Is there any knobs I can tweak to make it smoother? I'm using a spotlight and a couple of omnis to light up certain parts the spot cant reach, no skylights.
felipefrango - You can change your light shadow rendering method - it's default is set to a 512 shadow map. Under your light general parameters there's a shadows section, just hit the drop down and you can select the ray traced shadows as ZacD pointed out or increase your shadow map size in the "Shadow Map Params" tab. I usually just increase the size on heavier scenes due to increased rendering times with ray traced shadows.
Very interesting, thanks! I took a few test renders using ray traced shadows on the mustang but as you said, render times were around 3 minutes versus 20~30 seconds using shadow map. I just couldn't find the settings to increase the map size, glad you pointed that out for me.
Edit: Also, I meant to comment this before but I forgot. Catmull-Rom really makes a BIG difference as far as I could tell, renders look much sharper and the shades of grey pop out a little more, so if anyone's not achieving good results check if you're using it instead of the default Area filter.
Hi guys I've been looking for a way of rendering like this for ages without the Light Tracer XD. I clicked on the Tut link and got a 404 error has it been removed?
-Grab the 3DSMax 'normalmap maker' shader from Ben Cloward's folio (or setup a scene with the RGB normalmap lights)
-Apply to the highpoly model
-Make a animation>preview of this (renders the viewport to a file) at full res
-Take that "normalmap" in crazybump or xnormal, convert it to AO
-Overlay that on top of the render.
BAM, instand dark pits and bright peaks on the render. It looks great, kindof like the recent Appleseed and Vexile movies. Will post examples later!
Replies
BradMyers - Slick stuff man, good work!
i definatelly have this tutorial bookmarked for my new Folio im making !!
thank you X-Convinct!
Well I don't want to high jack this thread or anything but Patient09 PM'd me asking about the settings I used in particular, and I figured I would just post it here so people can look it up if they have similar questions.
Patient09: If you tell me exactly how you set up your scene and gave me a run down of what you have done it would certainly help.
But I will attempt to explain without that.
First off, I pretty much followed the tutorial exactly. Having one spot light directed on the gun and 1 sky light above (it doesn't really matter where you place a skylight though)
Here is where I deviated from the tutorial a little. I added a rim light aka an omni light behind the gun and up high enough to hit the edges of various details. I made the omni light just a little light blue almost white in color and its strength is 0.4 (I lieft all other settings for this omni on default)
This is a screen grab of my light setup:
Now the one issue I had was that the shadows were coming off pixilated and crappy. I figured out it was coming from shadows that my spot light was making. My solution was to play with the "Shadow Map Params" dialogue in my spot lights settings. I increase the texture "Size" to 2048 (which gives the shadow map more resolution) and the "Sample Range" to 14 (which kind of blends and softens the shadows more). You can see these settings in the image above also.
Furthermore, here is a tutorial I found explaining this: http://www.cglearn.com/tutorials/max3/13_mapping_coords_still_life_part_3.html
The final thing I did to add a little bit more to my render was I rendered an Ambient Occlusion pass and photoshoped it in (I placed the AO render above my original render, set the blending to "Multiply" and set the Opacity to 30% which makes the whole render pop better) Vig actually mentioned somewhere that this was a good idea (he is right!) Then I saved and I was done.
Now the AO render can be a bit difficult to understand if you haven't done this kind of thing before and its an extra step. You should get good renders even without it. But here is how I found the solution to rendering AO, quick and easy. This is just a copy of a discussion of how to do this on another forum, plus I explained a little more in places.
"
There was comment by Glacierise...
"An AO pass is also very easy in mental ray - just create a mental ray material, put the ambient occlusion shader in the surface slot, then put the created material in the material override slot in render settings/processing, and disable exp control."
The terminology can be confusing .. especially what someone means when they say 'shader'. Someone will correct me, but I use it to mean any component you can put in a shader tree, so it can easily be a procedural map, like this one.
(***Follow these steps exactly and it will work***) (Be sure to set your renderer to Mental ray also)
Glacierise means: Select the [mental ray] material - (that's what it's called) and pop it in the material editor. You will see it has a 'Surface' slot. Put the AO map into this slot ("Ambient/Reflective Occlusion (3dsmax)". Then drag the whole material over to the Material Override slot ( in the main Render Settings / Processing tab (Press F10 to open Render Settings)) as an instance, so you can still adjust it back in the material editor. Render away.. every object in the scene will be allocated your new AO material, and you have an AO pass.
"
I didn't make any of this stuff up on my own, so I cannot take credit. It's really all thanks to this thread.
[Edit]
Oh yeah, on the ambient occlusion material (if you want to bake AO also as mentioned above) I increase the Samples to 64 (you should see "Samples:" in the root of that material).
Also if you press F10 for the render setup dialogue, under the "Renderer" Tab there is a section called "Sampling Quality". I changed the "Samples per Pixel" to "Minimum: 1" and "Maximum: 16"
These two settings will greatly improve the quality of your AO render.
screen grab, tut link, translated 3d geek jargon. this is above and beyond and i appreciate it.
will do a few test runs and post results.
thanks again.
What about playing around with a Z Depth Pass also, super quick to render, can be used for a few different things.
Go to render settings > render elements and add a ZDepth element. Render the scene it will spit out a grayscale image like above. Composite that into your shot, like AO or use this as a mask for effects like fog. You can also play with the min max settings to fine tune the depth.
So...
Vig: I'll try that z-depth trick you mentioned. The results look really cool. I have a pretty fast computer (quad core, 2 8800gt's, 8gigs ram) and I don't know much about what exactly it takes to speed up render times; but these renders take about 10 minutes for the main render, and a couple of minutes for the AO render.
[Edit]
Also note in regards to the time: The size I rendered was 2048x2048
Anyways, I can already see that one can get some really nice results with it. I ended up compositing a Z-Depth pass as an Overlay at 40 percent. Thanks again for the tip Vig
Model is still not the final product though
These are the kind of variations in the setup I was hoping for to give people slightly alternative methods with different results to choose from. I think everything here is looking great guys!
also thanks Brad for taking the time to put all that useful into together.
Here's a quick result with Ambient Occlusion pass on, great idea!
I messed with the material a bit more and was able to get the AO material to render within the shader, doing it this way saves you the trouble of saving out 2 images and having to comp them together in photoshop and still gives pretty much the exact same result. Here is an example, and then a link to my setup below it.
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/9279/materialtutnrek.jpg
Thanks a lot X-Convict for sharing this, its a pretty awesome setup. Brad and Vig thanks for also sharing your tweaks, both add some cool effects. I finally took some time to play with this, and I am really glad I did
I pretty much followed the tutorial exactly to get a base then went and changed some values and added falloffs to get some built in rim light effects. After I got that then I used Brad's method to render out an AO pass.
I included a pic of the setup in case anyone is curious.
http://img22.imageshack.us/my.php?image=highpolymaterialtut.jpg
fiddled around with that tutorial with a mesh that i was just working on when i browsed this thread. added a slightly orange omni above the mesh.
- Rick.
That pic you posted, that's how you got the AO into the shader, right?
Thanks to everyone for sharing. here were my results from combining a few of the techniques mentioned in this thread so far on this board thingy I started last night.
I learned a lot from this thread, so thanks again to everyone for sharing! awesome stuff.
*runs and hides
Dashel Parr: "Which is another way of saying no one is" /lip pout
(and yes, i bumped this up for a reason)
http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/2361/scimitarnewortho.jpg
You can also mess a bit with the light position and brightness to get some lighter colors in there, like getting some more ridges highlighted.
And slightly offtopic, i think you need to make the hood intake a bit less boxy.
Edit: Also, I meant to comment this before but I forgot. Catmull-Rom really makes a BIG difference as far as I could tell, renders look much sharper and the shades of grey pop out a little more, so if anyone's not achieving good results check if you're using it instead of the default Area filter.
enjoy
Thanks can't wait to work on my HP stuff
Paul
pior can you post some examples please?
or did anybody tried this technique?