3DS MAX 2017- ART Renderer
polycounter lvl 8
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.
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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.
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.
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....