Autodesk 3ds Max Design Training - Day Three

US CAD, Steve Bennett Instructor

• Use mr Photographic Exposure Control with Mental Ray rendering engine.
• Gamma - Star Trek reference
• Recommended "gamma pipeline" (Search Term in help), workflow in help. Gamma correction is applied to images to make them look correct. The program applies another one if it already has one which can make the images look incorrect. Have to apply to material before it gets rendered. Setting may be turned on/off per style.
• Usually adopt the file's gamma and LUT settings, if the warning box comes up. May cause rendering problems.
• Light lister to manage multiple lights from one place.
• FG - Final Gather
• Add lighting to a material can then be applied to an object.
• Make sure to set the exposure control when using Mental Ray, can make the rendered image look dark.
• Background images require the Physical Scale needs to be Unitless, a value of around 80,000 may be used (Page 4-67).
• RAM Player (under Rendering Menu) can compare images side by slide by sliding triangles top and bottom to compare. Can also show a sequence of photos.
• http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/gsdsquare/Publications/BuildingSimulation2009.3dsMaxAndDaysim.pdf
• Create exterior lighting in the Settings button from the Create tab.
• Always choose yes to create a 'mr Sky' environmental map.
• The sun does not need to be actual distance from earth to the sun, just needs to be above the scene.
• Outdoor scenes don't get much reflection or refractions, change values to 3 in the Render dialog box below the render window.
• Ambient Occlusion (AO), shadows at corners or light bouncing between surfaces.
• For materials, don't use for items far away or not needed. Mostly for walls and ceilings.
• Makes rendering take longer, use where needed not in every material.
• I suck at remembering vocabulary terms, but am good at remembering the concepts.
• Only ray trace shadows are applicable to ray trace rendering, the others are not applicable.
• Some good render settings, Diffuse Bounces should be 2 instead of 8.

• Look on page 5-14 if dots show up. Change Final Gather Settings in Render Setup.
• Image Precision (Antialiasing, keep values divisible by 4 usually). Controls how crisp edges appear.
• Creating a Render Farm
• Get the IP address of computer
• Enter it into the dialog box

• Make sure the computers are selected when rendering for them to be included.
• Create mental proxy graphics to export it out to a file and then improve performance. Kind of like datashortcuts in Civil 3D without the object living in a drawing, but an external file.
• Sky Portal - Light covering a window, raised light level for the scene. Primarily for interior shots.
• Use photometric lights with mental ray.
• Can do iterative rendering by selecting the object, then the icon to the right and then rerun and it just does the selected item.
• If doing a large project, Render Output to external file to create images.
• You are the key person.
• EPW file source: http://apps1.eere.energy.gov/buildings/energyplus/cfm/weather_data.cfm
• Autodesk University Class DV310-1 Creative Animation Techniques Used to Reveal Models in Advanced Visualization Projects

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