HQ Showreel Renders with Mental Ray
polycounter lvl 10
Hey,
iam just wondering how to render out your normal mapped game model with Mental Ray for Showreel reasons.
What are the best settings to get the best results with Mental Ray in Max?
I get errors on my normals in my models with mental ray renders and they dont look as crisp which looks perfectly fine with DirectX Shader in Max.
How do you guys tackle this? Which shader can Mental Ray handle to display Normals quite correct OR how can i render out realtime stuff if i do not wanna implement it in a Game Engine?
Thanks a lot.
iam just wondering how to render out your normal mapped game model with Mental Ray for Showreel reasons.
What are the best settings to get the best results with Mental Ray in Max?
I get errors on my normals in my models with mental ray renders and they dont look as crisp which looks perfectly fine with DirectX Shader in Max.
How do you guys tackle this? Which shader can Mental Ray handle to display Normals quite correct OR how can i render out realtime stuff if i do not wanna implement it in a Game Engine?
Thanks a lot.
Replies
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=61346
What's the point in making "real-time" work if you don't present what it looks like in real time?
True. Any way to get image sequences (camera movement) out of marmoset with using Max?
Honestly you really, really don't need MR for that. A simple render to get sharp shadows, why not, but MR would be a total waste of resources, long to render and! not looking like game stuff at all.
(example : Assassin's Creed 2 heads look great when rendered in zbrush/mentalray but look horrendous in the actual game...)
Besides that regarding your actual problem it looks as if MR processes the normalmap as a bumpmap, eek.
Why not simply setup a camera in Maya and render with hardware rendering. It will look exactly like the realtime stuff but you'd get access to motion blur and all.
Could you maybe hint me a link that would be great.
@Piar Yes iam not rly experienced with MentalRay yet and couldnt find anything on beauty renders for games. Will check it out.
Last but not least can Marmoset render out wireframe passes? Or any other realtime engine if i want to showcase it in Realtime aswell?
Thanks guys much appreciated.
I think Poir is also right and it looks like you hooked up or normal map as a regular bump map. In the bump slot put a NORMAL BUMP material (not a bitmap) and in that material put you're actual texture (bitmap). Otherwise it treats it as a standard height map, yuck!
I actually used a normap bump material in the bump map slot. Its even on 100.
In Scanline it looks the same as in MentalRay since i didnt use any special MR Shaders.
In scanline i had light tracer and supersampler on.
This head is suppose to be textured of course
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=67568&highlight=maya+realtime
It appears to make no difference if lighttracer is turned on or off.
About GI in general i dont know but it makes sence.
Sorry but i am still on the search for a mental ray shader in Max since i am not a Maya user. Now maybe i wasnt quite clear on this but i need no real time viewport shader since i need video footage with camera pans, wireframe/AO passes and working normals. Dont know of a way to render out HD footage from viewport in Max. How do you enable the hardware render with mental ray in max?
So the only problem is how to make normals look good with either mentalRay or scanline. I used a standart material, put a normal bump into the bump slot. Set up a basic 3 light setup and tried with or without lighttracer, supersampler. So i assume its my MR settings/shaders.
Now i am rendering multiple objects, environment that needs to be in HD resolution. Since ive never done a showreel and cant find much helpful stuff on the web or on these forums regarding that topic iam still lost. Max Tutorials on this get more and more rare
In the end iam planing to put my stuff in Unreal Engine anyway but due to "uni deadlines" i need something out of max or rather quick. Thought a MR render with normals wouldnt be that hard to do.
@Seaseme cheers anyway
saw this over at gameartisans.
it's for max though.
You can also get some funky lighting errors when switching back and forth between MR and scanline because it converts your lights when you switch. You might want to start with a fresh scene, import your head, hook up your mats and redo the lighting, all with it set to scanline. Maybe just redoing the lights while in scanline would work but to be safe start fresh.
Set the AA Filter to Catmull-Rom which will give you sharper renders. Area (the default) tends to blur quite a bit. Catmull-Rom also blurs but it sharpens afterward.
Set the lights to use Shadow Map.
Then turn on Use Far Attenuation and adjust the start/end to give your lights a nice falloff effect.
Then go into Shadow Map Params and set the size to 1024 or 2048. This is the size of the map it will use to generate shadows. Lower numbers mean more jagged edges, higher are crisper. If you run out of memory when rendering you might need to turn this back down. You can use any size you want, I stick to powers of two out of habbit.
Then set the sample range to 6-8.This is how many pixels from the edge of the shadow it will blur. The higher the sample range the softer the shadows. The falloff might have softened them up enough already.
Yea thats probably it. Its XNormals forgot to flip it.
Like Vig said, use Animation > Make Preview. I've been doing that all week at work to create our showreel, works perfectly. You can even get masks from it if you set the background to black and use a pure white shader.
Yesterday I recorded a video of me setting up a completely finished and textured model, going from default viewport gray to completely set-up shader and it took me 8 minutes, including grabbing the image. If I were to capture a 250-frame 360 it would take 10-12 minutes total.
Once you're used to working that fast you really don't want to go back to rendering software
I think i end up using the Cryengine2 SkinShader. You get pretty good results with that one.
Marmoset doesnt help me since i need turntable renders.
You could very well record your screen while rotating the model 'by hand'. As a matter of fact it would give a great realtime feel - like, it's really ready to be put in a game, no tricks involved!
I saw a ree rendered that way and it made alot of sense. Usually videos are not needed for modeler's folios but in this case it really showed up how the piece reacted, and much better than a perfect turnaround.
I'd say go for it!
Oh and if you really want perfect turnarounds in a realtime viewer ... you could alwaysmake an Autohotkey script taking care of the mouse inputs. Just sayin'!